The successive coalitions organised to resist French expansion during the period of the Revolution and the Empire followed a general pattern and policy which had well-established precedents in European diplomacy. Since the close of the Middle Ages any dynasty or state that threatened to achieve a dominant position on the continent had been checked by a coalition of its neighbours. This traditional response, often described as the policy of maintaining a balance of power, operated in an intermittent fashion. It was not a consistent policy but rather a collective response to a recurrent danger. During the intervals when the states of Europe existed in an uneasy equilibrium the balance of power as a principle attracted little attention. Only when some powerful and militant state, by a dynamic expansion of its influence and territory, created a manifest imbalance in the European system, did the remaining states compose then: differences sufficiently to co-operate in restoring a balance. How unstable such coalitions might prove, and how vulnerable they were to dissolution after a defeat or a victory, the vicissitudes of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars repeatedly demonstrated.

Throughout most of the eighteenth century the European system remained fairly stable. From the early years of that century, when the War of the Spanish Succession finally checked the ascendancy France had gained under Louis XIV, until the final decade when the victories of the revolutionary armies again made France a threat, the balance of power in Europe was not seriously disturbed. It is true that the naval, commercial and colonial successes won by Great Britain made the eighteenth century a period of British ascendancy.