Napoleon's Greatest Triumph: The Battle of Austerlitz

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INTRODUCTION

Fought between Napoleon’s Grande Armée and Austro-Russian forces operating in Moravia, 37 miles (60km) north-east of Vienna and widely regarded as the tactical masterstroke of Napoleon’s long military career, Austerlitz stands as one of the greatest victories in military history. A single December day’s fighting crushed the Third Coalition, with far-reaching political and strategic implications for French control in Central Europe. Austerlitz also represented a brilliant exercise in grand tactics; in the face of numerically superior forces, Napoleon encouraged Allied commanders to follow the course of action which he intended by establishing a battlefield scenario that he could control, before he proceeded to implement his plan: splitting the Allied army in half before defeating its component parts in turn.

Austerlitz is noteworthy, too, for the fact that Napoleon’s prowess and the effectiveness of the Grande Armée as a fighting force reached its apogee there, and it constituted the battle of which the emperor himself was most proud. The climax of a remarkable campaign, Austerlitz crowned the efforts of an army which demonstrated one of the key elements of strategic success: speed. The Grande Armée, poised around Boulogne on the Channel coast for the invasion of England, broke camp and in twenty days reached the Rhine; two months later it entered Vienna; and a fortnight later, under the emperor’s command, it destroyed the Third Coalition in an eight-hour engagement. If Napoleon gambled supremely in the campaign of 1805, he generally gambled correctly, partly benefitting from his own well-developed plan, as well as by the errors committed by his opponents.

French bivouac on the evening before Austerlitz. Napoleon’s Grande Armée, at the peak of its morale and honed to a superb level of fitness and training between 1803 and 1805, constituted the best fighting force of its generation.

Austerlitz is all the more remarkable for the fact that it might very well have gone badly wrong. While it began auspiciously when Napoleon’s forces enveloped an entire Austrian army at Ulm, in Bavaria, followed by the occupation of Vienna, the Grande Armée faced a potentially perilous position by the following month, for while Austrian forces had been reduced to a remnant, the Russians managed to elude the advancing French and rendezvous with strong reinforcements near Austerlitz. Operating at a considerable distance from France, his resources stretched, facing a coalition mounting operations across a broad front, with the Prussians mobilising sufficient forces to tip the balance against him and with two Austrian armies still intact and situated to his rear, Napoleon could neither retreat for fear of its interpretation as retreat nor pursue the Allies any deeper into Austrian territory lest he risk his own encirclement and destruction. His only option lay in striking quickly and effectively, for he required nothing short of decisive victory.

With this in view, Napoleon sought to entice the Allies into fighting a battle on his own terms – using ground of his choosing and with a strong element of deception – thus compensating for the numerical advantage enjoyed by his opponents. In the event, he did precisely this, selecting an area just west of the village of Austerlitz which offered him the opportunity to design a plan to provoke the Allies into attacking on unfavourable terms. Accordingly, he sent his aide to Allied headquarters, tasked with persuading Tsar Alexander of Russia and Emperor Francis of Austria that Napoleon was anxious to avoid battle and keen to negotiate peace. Napoleon reinforced this impression of timidity by withdrawing his troops from the strategically important Pratzen Heights, west of Austerlitz. By conceding this dominant position to his opponents and by deliberately weakening his right flank, Napoleon encouraged the Allies to attack at points of his designation – all according to his elaborate plan of deception. Finally, in a calculated move, the French emperor positioned his reinforcements well back from view, leaving the impression of weak numbers – and consequently deceived the Allies into seriously underestimating French strength. A strong element of risk attended this plan, however, for success depended entirely on the Allies seizing the heights, and at the same time the French right wing withstanding the onslaught of superior numbers.

Crossing the River Inn on 28 October, French troops enter Austria. In their strategic plan the Allies certainly never envisaged conducting the campaign on home soil.

The Austrian surrender at Ulm, 20 October 1805, during the campaign in Bavaria prior to the French invasion of Habsburg territory. This and other capitulations left to the Russians responsibility for most of the Allies’ next six weeks of campaigning.

Quite apart from its significance at the grand tactical level, Austerlitz left a long-standing political legacy, eliminating the last marks of Austrian influence and territorial holdings in Germany and Italy, leaving Napoleon master of half the continent and therefore solidly on the road to establishing the greatest empire in Europe since the fall of Rome – a position achieved only eighteen months after the destruction of the Third Coalition. He consolidated his hold over Italy by annexing the last Habsburg territories in the region, adding them to the Kingdom of Italy, of which Napoleon crowned himself king, and occupied Naples, eliminating the last vestiges of resistance on the peninsula. He placed his sisters on the thrones of several German states, nearly all of which he fashioned into a new political entity: the Confederation of the Rhine, all dependent on, or subservient to, France. On this basis – quite apart from the masterful means employed by Napoleon during the Ulm campaign and at Austerlitz five weeks later – the battle led directly to a substantial shift in the European balance of power, placing France in so dominant a position as to require a further decade of fighting before the Continent could finally eradicate the menace of Napoleonic imperialism.

A SHORT BACKGROUND TO THE NAPOLEONIC WARS

A Decade of Bloodshed: The French Revolutionary Wars, 1792–1802

When hostilities broke out in May 1803 between Britain and France – after a brief period of peace lasting fourteen months – this renewed conflict marked the beginning of a series of campaigns, some co-ordinated, others not, which eventually involved practically every state in Europe, known as the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). The first phase, the War of the Third Coalition, an alliance of Britain, Russia, Austria, Sweden and Naples, arose out of Britain’s diplomatic initiative and, to a lesser extent, a similar effort on the part of the tsar and his deputy foreign minister, Prince Adam Czartoryski. It was this coalition – the third attempt by the great (and many lesser) powers to limit the growth of French power and influence – whose fate the Battle of Austerlitz sealed in a single day in December 1805.

To understand the genesis of events which led to that seminal event, one must cast back into the previous decade for, to be strictly accurate, the Napoleonic Wars represented merely an extension of the conflict which had begun a decade before, known as the French Revolutionary Wars. During this series of conflicts, most nations formed at some point part of at least one of the two great yet unsuccessful coalitions seeking to curb the growing power of republican France. We must therefore turn to the roles played by the principal European powers in the great struggles of the 1790s, examine the events which concluded hostilities in 1802, consider the factors which contributed to their renewal in May 1803 and, finally, establish the circumstances which led to the formation of the Third Coalition, whose forces Napoleon shattered in the greatest battle of his long and distinguished command.

Russia, under Tsarina Catherine (the Great), took no part in the War of the First Coalition (1792–97). On her death in 1796 the tsarina was succeeded by her son, Paul, who suffered from bouts of mental illness and quixotic behaviour. In 1799, he joined the Second Coalition (1798–1802) as a consequence of the growing French threat to Russian interests in the Mediterranean, especially the occupation of Malta, seized during Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt the previous year, as well as the dissolution of the Order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, who had ruled the island since 1530. The dispossessed knights sought assistance from Paul, whom they made Grand Master of the Order. The Russians achieved early successes in the field, fighting in Italy and Switzerland, but relations with Austria became strained and Russia withdrew from the war in late 1799. When Paul was assassinated in a palace coup in March 1801, his 23-year-old son, Alexander, succeeded him as tsar. Alexander and his deputy foreign minister, Prince Adam Czartoryski, were to play prominent roles in the formation of the Third Coalition. In the meantime, with the French ousted by the British from Malta in 1800 and Egypt the following year, Alexander did not renew his country’s participation in the War of the Second Coalition (consisting of Austria, Russia, Turkey, Britain, Naples and Portugal). Russia and France concluded a formal peace settlement in October 1801, whereby the French recognised Russia’s interests in the eastern Mediterranean and promised to consult Alexander concerning the reorganisation of the borders of many of the small German states, in whose affairs Russia took a great interest, partly as a consequence of the tsar’s connection, through his wife, with the Electorate of Baden.

Prussia had, along with Austria, numbered among the first of the Great Powers to declare war on revolutionary France in 1792 and constituted a mainstay of the First Coalition, which would grow to include Spain, Holland, Britain, Sardinia, Naples, Portugal, the minor German states of the Holy Roman Empire and others. She briefly invaded France in 1792, but after her repulse at the Battle of Valmy she ceased to play a significant further part in the war and eventually withdrew from the coalition by the Treaty of Basle in April 1795. Prussia was swiftly followed by Spain, largely owing to the distractions arising to the former, Russia and Austria by the partitions of Poland in 1793 and 1795. Prussia remained neutral during the War of the Second Coalition, though King Frederick William III and Alexander developed a friendship from June 1802, owing to shared interests in limiting French influence in Germany.

Austria, under the Habsburg emperor Francis II, who came to the throne in 1792, controlled a vast Central and Eastern European empire containing a multitude of nationalities, including Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Italians, Poles and others, and would prove one of the most implacable enemies of France. Austria remained active throughout the War of the First Coalition, even when practically all the other members, apart from Britain, had abandoned the cause by April 1796. By this point Austria had waged numerous campaigns in the Low Countries and along the Rhine, and was imminently to engage the French in northern Italy under the young General Napoleon Bonaparte. In the event, Bonaparte’s campaigns of 1796–97 proved a great success and brought his army within 80 miles (129km) of Vienna after the decisive French victory at Rivoli, resulting in the Treaty of Campo Formio in October 1797. By its terms, Austria recognised the French occupation of the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) – overrun by republican forces two years before; conceded the loss of Lombardy; accepted as a fait accompli the French occupation of the left bank of the Rhine; and recognised the Cisalpine Republic, a satellite state of the French republic in Italy. Austria,