Talk:List of battles of the War of the First Coalition

Editorial decisions
Dear colleagues,

In making this list, I have had to make several editorial decisions that I would like to account for. First of all, the list is heavily based on all the battles that are currently included in the Category:Battles of the War of the First Coalition, and this list is intended to become the main article for this category. I've also added some other battles to the list while gathering information, for example battles that were included in several campaignboxes or were mentioned inside articles or on French Wikipedia, but not included in the category (yet). Since there were several conflicts happening simultaneously across the planet that could be identified as part of the French Revolutionary Wars generally, but not necessarily relate to the War of the First Coalition specifically, historians and also Wikipedians are trying to make an adequate categorisation of each battle per conflict, per threatre, per front, per campaign, or however you'd like to call it. I've followed the current categorisation of English Wikipedia, which has separated the War in the Vendée (and the Chouannerie) from the War of the First Coalition in separate subcategories (Category:Battles of the War in the Vendée is a subcategory of Category:Battles of the French Revolutionary Wars, not of category:Battles of the War of the First Coalition). Although they happened simultaneously, the French First Republic was the prime belligerent in all three, and the First Coalition and the French Royalists both inside (Vendeans, Chouans and others such as the White Terror) and outside France (Armée des Émigrés) all sought to restore the Bourbon monarchy, there was very little contact and coordination between the Royalists inside France and Coalition forces outside France, and it may be said that inside Royalists did not constitute a party to the Coalition, whereas the Émigrés arguably did (though as a non-state actor, but often led by Bourbons in exile). So I understand this separate categorisation. Generally speaking, the Haitian Revolution and the East Indies theatre of the French Revolutionary Wars are also separated from the War of the First Coalition in categories and campaignboxes on English Wikipedia (Category:Haitian Revolution is a subcategory of Category:French Revolutionary Wars, not of Category:War of the First Coalition), but there continues to be some overlap. I've decided to exclude Haitian and East Indies battles based on the fact that English Wikipedia generally categorises these battles separately, that aside from Great Britain there was no other First Coalition party active in the East Indies, and the Treaty of Campo Formio did not affect hostilities in the East Indies or Haiti, the Haitian Revolution had already begun 21 August 1791 (well before 20 April 1792, with its independent causes), and it was a very complicated conflict with its own dimension, quite detached from the European theatre (unlike other trans-Atlantic battles such as Guadeloupe, Martinique and the Newfoundland expedition). These factors, I think, do not apply to the War of the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean campaign of 1793–1796, that were intricately linked to the Flanders, Rhine, Swiss and Italian campaigns of the First Coalition, and so I have decided include these.

Once this list is published, I suggest to more properly separate Haiti and the East Indies from the First Coalition. Moreover, there are probably still lots of battles missing from this list that should be on there, perhaps some that haven't even been written yet in English, but have been in French, German, Dutch, Italian or some other Wikipedia version. We also need to establish a consensus on the chronological and geographical framing of the Flanders and Rhine campaigns: does the literature agree to divide the Rhine campaigns up into periods that took about a year, but regard the Flanders campaign as a single event that took many years? And when did the "Flanders campaign" start (28 April 1792? 6 November 1792? When the British joined in February 1793, as the article originally stated?) and end (18 January 1795 with the Batavian Revolution in Amsterdam? 23/4 January with the Capture of the Dutch fleet at Den Helder? 7 June 1795 with the surrender of Luxembourg, or was that part of the Rhine campaign of 1795?)? Finally, I hope to find a solution to the technical problem I keep having when trying to make this table sortable by date. The Template:Date table sorting doesn't seem to know how to chronologically order dmy dates, it still believes 6 November 1792 comes before 28 April 1792. If anyone understands how it works, please fix it or explain me how to fix it! Greetings, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 16:17, 31 January 2020 (UTC)