Editing Battle of Fleurus (1794) (section)

==Aftermath==
The battle of Fleurus had been intense and unrelenting, and both French and Allied armies were exhausted by the fighting. Indeed, Soult wrote that it was "fifteen hours of the most desperate fighting I ever saw in my life."{{sfn|Glover|1987|p=162}} The French did not pursue the retreating Allied army in any way, and made no movements for two days to rest. The Allies, meanwhile, retreated to Braine l’Alleud and Waterloo.

It is generally agreed that the battle was a costly one for the French, with casualties estimated between five and six thousand. The Allied losses have always been in dispute: the French claimed significantly higher losses than their own, while the Allies claimed far less. Traditional estimates attribute "considerable casualties" to Coburg's army,{{sfn|Chandler|1973|p=169}} and hover near five thousand Allied killed and wounded.{{sfn|Rothenberg|1980|p=247}}{{sfn|Dodge|1904|p=114}}{{sfn|Jobson|1841|p=312}} However, according to historian Digby Smith (1998), Austrian-Dutch losses numbered 208 killed, 1,017 wounded, and 361 captured. In addition, the French captured one mortar, three caissons, and one standard, while the [[Austrians]] captured one cannon and one standard.{{sfn|Smith|1998|pp=86–87}}

While tactically indecisive, Fleurus was the strategically the decisive battle of the French campaign of 1794 in the Low Countries, after which the Austrians gave up on contesting the Low Countries, and left it to the French. Smith (1998) wrote:

<blockquote>By this stage of the war the court in [[Vienna]] was convinced that it was no longer worth the effort to try to hold on to the Austrian Netherlands and it is suspected that Coburg gave up the chance of a victory here so as to be able to pull out eastwards.{{sfn|Smith|1998|p=87}}</blockquote>

After Fleurus, Jourdan's force was formally consolidated as the [[Army of Sambre and Meuse]], and given the mission of capturing the eastern Low Countries and going after Coburg's army. Just a month after Fleurus, Jourdan had occupied Mechelen and Louvain (15 July), Namur (17 July) and Liege (27 July), while Pichegru had entered Brussels (11 July) and captured Antwerp (27 July). 

Unable and unwilling to contest the French advance further, and threatened with destruction by the combined pressure from Pichegru's and Jourdan's armies acting in concert (which did not happen only because the Committee of Public Safety diverted Pichegru's forces elsewhere at the crucial time), Coburg began a retreat eastward to the Meuse on 15 July, and crossed the river at Maastricht, the eastern border of the Low Countries, into Germany on the 24th. The main battlefields of the war against Austria would now shift from Belgium to Germany and the Rhine.

The Austrian defeat at Fleurus also led to the [[Low Countries theatre of the War of the First Coalition|breakup of the Allied army in the north]] as the Austrian abandonment of the Low Countries also led to the withdrawal of English and Dutch forces northwards, away from the Austrians, to defend the Netherlands. The Duke of York's forces crossed into the Netherlands at Roosendaal on 24 July, the same day Coburg crossed the Meuse at Maastricht, leaving the Low Countries completely vacated. Divided and outnumbered, the English and Dutch were incapable of holding back the French on their own, and, overturned by the Batavian revolution in Amsterdam on 18 January 1795, the Dutch Republic was extinguished and replaced by the pro-French Batavian Republic instead. 

Politically, the battle invalidated the argument that continuation of the revolutionary [[Reign of Terror]] was necessary because of the military threat to France's very existence. Thus, some would argue, victory at Fleurus was a leading cause of the [[Thermidorian Reaction]] a month later. Saint-Just arrived in Paris after such a great victory only to die with [[Maximilien Robespierre]] and the other leading Jacobins.