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.

[Sidenote: The Peace of Luneville.]

Egypt indeed was more than ever their own, for their army had now
penetrated to the cataracts of the Nile, and a Turkish force which
landed near Alexandria was cut to pieces by Buonaparte in the battle of
Aboukir. But the news of defeat at home and the certainty that all wider
hopes in the East were at an end, induced him only a month after his
victory to leave his army. With a couple of frigates he set sail for
France; and his arrival in Paris was soon followed by a change in the
government. The Directors were divided among themselves, while the
disasters of their administration made them hateful to the country; and
a revolution brought about by the soldiery on the 10th of November put
an end to their power. In the new system which followed three consuls
took the place of the Directors; but the system only screened the
government of a single man, for under the name of First Consul
Buonaparte became in effect sole ruler of the country. His energy at
once changed the whole face of European affairs. The offers of peace
which he made to England and Austria were intended to do little more
than to shake the coalition, and gain breathing time for the
organization of a new force which was gathering in secrecy at Dijon,
while Moreau with the army of the Rhine pushed again along the Danube.
The First Consul crossed the Saint Bernard with this army in the spring
of 1800, and on the 14th of June a victory at Marengo left the Austrian
army, which had just succeeded in reducing Genoa, helpless in his hands.
It was by the surrender of all Lombardy to the Oglio that the defeated
general obtained an armistice for his troops; and a similar truce
arrested the march of Moreau, who had captured Munich and was pushing
on to Vienna. The armistice only added to the difficulties of
Buonaparte's opponents, for Russia, as anxious not to establish a German
supremacy as she had been to weaken the supremacy of France, had
withdrawn from the contest as soon as the coalition seemed to be
successful; and Austria was only held back from peace by her acceptance
of