Initially, the rulers of Europe viewed the French Revolution as an internal dispute between the French king and his subjects. As revolutionary rhetoric grew more strident, the European monarchs declared that their interests were the same as Louis XVI and his family; the Declaration of Pillnitz (27 August 1791) threatened ambiguous but quite serious, consequences if anything should happen to the royal family. The position of the revolutionaries became increasingly difficult and compounding their problems in international relations, French émigrés continued to agitate for support of a counter-revolution. On 20 April 1792, the French National Convention declared war on Austria, beginning the War of the First Coalition (1792–98). France ranged itself against most of the European states sharing land or water borders, plus Portugal and the Ottoman Empire. Despite some victories in 1792, by early 1793 French forces had been pushed out of Belgium, there was an internal revolt in the Vendée over conscription, wide-spread public resentment of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the French king had just been executed. The armies of the French Republic were in a state of disruption; the problems became even more acute following the introduction of mass conscription, the "levée en masse", which saturated an already distressed army with thousands of illiterate, untrained men. For the French, the Rhine Campaign of 1795 proved especially disastrous, although they had achieved some success in other theaters of war (see for example, War of the Pyrenees (1793–95)).