Napoleon's Defeat of the Habsburgs

John H. Gill

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781783830718
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This history of the 1809 Franco-Austrian War presents an in-depth chronicle Napoleon's last great victory.
 
On April 10th, 1809, while Napoleon was occupied in Western Europe with the Peninsular War, the Austrian Empire launched a surprise attack that sparked the War of the Fifth Coalition. Though France would ultimately win the conflict, it would be Napoleon's last victorious war. Even then, the margin of French superiority was decreasing. Archduke Charles, the best of the Habsburg commanders, led a reformed Austrian Army that was arguably the best ever fielded by the Danubian Monarchy.
 
Though caught off guard, the French Emperor reversed a dire strategic situation with stunning blows that he called his 'most brilliant and most skillful maneuvers'. Following a breathless pursuit down the Danube valley, Napoleon occupied the palaces of the Habsburgs for the second time in four years. He would win many battles in his future campaigns, but never again would one of Europe's great powers lie broken at his feet.
 
In Thunder on the Danube, historian John H. Gill tackles the political background of the war, including the motivations behind the Austrian offensive. Gill also demonstrates that 1809 was both a high point of the First Empire as well as a watershed, for Napoleon's armies were declining in quality and he was beginning to display the corrosive flaws that contributed to his downfall five years later. His opponents, on the other hand, were improving.

CHAPTER 1

War Is Unavoidable

The roots of the Franco-Austrian War of 1809 can be traced back to the rise of Republican and Imperial France and the collapse of the old international order in Europe. Though spattered with the blood of innumerable brutal battles, this old order had been founded on a set of shared assumptions that placed limits on the behaviour of states. This was the age of cabinet wars and small, expensive, professional armies. Influence might be gained or lost, baronies exchanged or fortresses conquered, but a certain balance was maintained among the major powers: Austria, Russia, Prussia, France, and Great Britain. The precise position each of these states occupied in the constellation of powers could shift, and frequently did (Prussia, for instance, had been a second-rate power until the mid-eighteenth century), but their status as Great Powers was fairly stable, their legitimacy as hereditary monarchies unquestioned.

As the eighteenth century became the nineteenth, however, events in France fundamentally altered the equations of power on the continent. Rising from the violence and dark chaos of its political and social upheaval, the new France was a revolutionary state, inherently threatening to the existence as well as the interests of the established dynasties.¹ This did not mean that every eye in every capital was focused on Paris. In the first years following the Revolution, Russia, Prussia, and Austria were far more concerned with the partitions of Poland than they were with events beyond the Rhine.² Indeed most governments made some effort to incorporate the new France into the European system. As time went on, however, most European rulers, particularly the court in Vienna, came to find France abhorrent and incomprehensible, a regicide nation ruled by zealots that proceeded to accept an upstart commoner as its emperor. It was dangerous and unpredictable, capable of anything.

Furthermore, Revolutionary France proved as difficult to combat as it was to comprehend. As the various regimes in Paris were challenging the very foundations of the international system, their armies were forging new ways of war, casting aside old patterns and inflicting a series of diplomatic humiliations and military reverses upon their numerous opponents. Shaped by the exigencies of France’s confused and desperate situation, the size, composition, organisation, tactics, logistics, and spirit of these armies were unprecedented on the European scene, and the old, dynastic militaries, trammelled by the linear norms of the Frederickian era, were left to grope for adequate responses to a phenomenon they only dimly understood. This process accelerated with the growing prominence of Napoleon Bonaparte and assumed terrifying proportions as he began to combine military genius with political power.

The hammer blows fell most heavily on the ancient House of Habsburg. Bitter military defeats of 1797, 1800, and 1805 stunned the Danube monarchy and left it powerless to resist French demands. The treaties that concluded these campaigns, signed at Campo Formio (17 October 1797), Lunéville (9 February 1801), and Pressburg (26 December 1805) respectively, not only cost Vienna prestige, territory, and treasure, but also resulted in a general retreat of Austrian power from Germany and Italy. The erosion of Habsburg influence in central Germany, the principal arena of Franco-Austrian rivalry, was especially alarming to Vienna. Here French successes gradually demolished the ramshackle framework of the Holy Roman Empire, the ossified institution through which the dynasty had for centuries influenced events in Germany. The Treaty of Lunéville, for example, was followed by the Imperial Recess of 25 February 1803 that legitimised French possession of all German lands on the left (west) bank of the Rhine and drastically reorganised the smaller states of the decrepit empire in accordance with Napoleon’s wishes. The consequences of Austerlitz and the Treaty of Pressburg were even more devastating for Habsburg interests. Having broken Austrian military power on the battlefield, Napoleon solidified his hold on Germany by forming the Confederation of the Rhine (Rheinbund) on 12 July 1806 with himself as its protector. He then dissolved the old empire, forcing Kaiser Franz of Habsburg, simultaneously ‘Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation’ and Emperor of Austria, to surrender the imperial title that had been virtually hereditary to the Habsburg family since 1438.³ Though Prussia still remained to challenge French hegemony, Napoleon had effectively assumed Austria’s place as the arbiter of political affairs between the Rhine and the Elbe.

The Austrian position in Italy was also crumbling. Annexing some territories outright and bringing others under his control by crowning himself the King of Italy in May 1805, Napoleon exploited his repeated military victories to effect a dramatic expansion of French influence in Italy at Vienna’s expense. As a consequence, Austria, once the dominant factor in the northern half of the peninsula, was gradually pushed back over the Alps and the Isonzo; its sole remaining outlet to the sea, Trieste, existed at Napoleon’s pleasure and Vienna had to grant French troops unrestricted free passage through Istria. Franz was equally helpless when Napoleon evicted the Bourbons from Naples and installed his elder brother Joseph as king in their stead. By the late summer of 1806, therefore, France had replaced Austria as the pre-eminent power in both central Germany and the Italian peninsula. Its armies demoralised, its treasury exhausted, and its foreign policy in ruins, the Habsburg monarchy stood on the margins of European affairs, its Great Power status no longer assured.

Austria’s situation deteriorated further that autumn when Prussia, which had observed from the sidelines during the Ulm-Austerlitz campaign, decided to take up arms against the Grande Armée. Napoleon’s double victory at Jena-Auerstädt and the relentless pursuit that followed, deepened the pall of gloom hanging over Vienna. Although some of Franz’s ministers advised armed intervention on the side of Prussia and Russia, Archduke Charles, the army commander, declared that the Habsburg military was hopelessly unprepared for combat and the Kaiser would not be moved. Even after Napoleon was checked in the gruesome affray at Eylau on 7 February 1807, Franz reportedly told a Russian emissary: ‘Beat the French a second time and I will declare myself!’⁴ But there were no more dubious victories for Napoleon. In the spring, his army recovered, he struck out at the Russians, caught their principal force at Friedland and smashed it. Alexander I, Tsar of all the Russias, sued for peace and met the Emperor of the French on a raft in the river Neman at Tilsit to decide the fate of Europe. Friedrich Wilhelm III, the hapless King of Prussia, whose misguided policies had started the war, could only wait in the wings, trusting that the tsar’s munificence would preserve his realm from Napoleon’s wrath. The Austrians were not even invited.

Although he had excluded them from the Tilsit negotiations, Napoleon was generally well disposed towards the Austrians in the late summer of 1807. For many in Vienna, however, the situation was worse than it had been after Pressburg. ‘Of all evil results, the evilest has come to pass,’ lamented Kaiser Franz’s new foreign minister, Graf Johann Philipp Stadion.⁵ With the Holy Roman Empire destroyed, Prussia crushed, and Russia allied to France, Austria was isolated in Europe, nearly bankrupt, and threatened from every quarter: the French in Italy, Germany and Silesia, the Russians on the borders of Galicia. Napoleon had even resurrected a Polish entity in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, lighting a distant lamp for the ethnic Poles under the Habsburg sceptre.⁶ With its army only beginning to recover from the cataclysm of 1805, and with no prospect of alliance, Austria was hardly able to influence its own destiny. It could only bide its time, build its strength, and wait for an opportunity.

This enforced delay in seeking vengeance against Napoleon deeply frustrated Stadion and, more than any other individual, he would be the architect of the coming conflict. Eldest son of the first minister at the court of the Elector of Mainz, Philipp Stadion grew up within the comfortable confines of the Holy Roman Empire, imbued with a deep respect for its institutions and the balance it seemed to maintain among the interests of states great and small. His family’s privileged position among the minor imperial nobility also brought power, status, and considerable revenue derived from large estates in Schwaben (Swabia). Napoleon destroyed this predictable old world and it is hardly surprising that Stadion bore an implacable hatred for the French emperor.⁷ As he told the former Hanoverian ambassador in Vienna: ‘Austria cannot view the Peace of Pressburg as anything other than a ceasefire; it has not renounced the hope and desire to take its revenge for all its humiliations.’⁸ From December 1805, when he assumed office in place of the discredited Graf Ludwig Cobenzl, he thus strove to set the conditions for a new contest with France, a struggle that would lead to the eviction of France from central Germany and the restoration of some institution similar to the Holy Roman Empire with Austria as its leading power.⁹ This extraordinarily ambitious goal implied two immediate tasks.¹⁰ First, he had to preclude any further erosion of Austria’s current position. Indeed, convinced as he was of Napoleon’s malevolent intentions towards Vienna, Stadion firmly believed he had to forestall another French war of conquest that might eradicate the Habsburg monarchy entirely. Thus, as early as July 1807, he wrote: ‘We must not deceive ourselves, any day we could find ourselves in circumstances where we will have to risk everything, where our very existence, one way or another, could be extinguished.’¹¹ This sense of desperate crisis, this notion of an imminent, all-or-nothing struggle for the ‘very existence’ of the monarchy would continue to inform his judgements throughout the coming two years. With Austrian power at a low ebb in the wake of Pressburg, however, his ability even to guarantee the empire’s continued existence was questionable and he recognised that, for the moment at least, war was an unacceptable policy option. The other extreme alternative, alliance with France, he found repugnant, as it would place Austria in the ranks of ‘tributary lands groaning under the French yoke’.¹² Biding his time, then, Stadion worked to preserve Austria’s independence, attempting to retain its freedom to manoeuvre diplomatically on the European stage while exerting himself to strengthen the monarchy morally and materially for the coming test. None the less, he chafed impatiently under the delay and eagerly examined every new development in the hope of discovering an opportunity for Austria to strike at Napoleon.

Stadion’s second task was the establishment of a domestic consensus that would actively support a new war in Germany. Fortunately for him, Vienna was awash with dispossessed nobles, defeated generals, distraught courtiers, and other disgruntled individuals who had lost their old dispensations in the storm of war and revolution since 1792. They provided the foreign minister with a receptive audience for his interpretation of events. Forced from their lands and lives by Napoleon’s conquests, they shared Stadion’s sense of loss and outrage at the destruction of the old order, his experience as an exile, his hatred of Napoleon and the French Revolution, and his desire for vengeance. They also shared—and stoked—his sense of crisis.¹³ A loose collection of individuals rather than a cohesive interest group, they nonetheless formed a dedicated and vocal ‘war party’ (‘Kriegs-partei’) at the heart of the Habsburg Empire. Their passionate urgings for a new contest with France charged the air with tension and helped push the hesitant Kaiser down the road to war. The existence of a vague war faction can be traced back to the campaign of 1806–7, when some prominent Austrians had called for Franz to join Prussia, and, by early 1808, its members had acquired considerable influence. Especially important among those who advocated confrontation with the ‘Corsican ogre’ were the expatriate Germans and Italians who filled the ranks of Stadion’s foreign ministry. Among these, the foreign minister’s ardent elder brother, Friedrich Lothar Stadion, Austria’s ambassador to Bavaria, would play a critical role as war approached. More noticeable and influential, however, were members of the Kaiser’s family, particularly his younger brother Johann and a clutch of displaced imperial relations who had gained access to the throne when Franz married their sister, Maria Ludovica Habsburg-d’Este, in January 1808. Driven from their Italian home by the brash General Bonaparte, the d’Este family yearned for the downfall of the minatory Emperor Napoleon. Two of them, the Archdukes Ferdinand and Maximilian, had acquired important military responsibilities and, together with their cousin Johann, they toured the Habsburg lands, issuing inflammatory proclamations and causing Napoleon to complain.¹⁴ The charming and determined Maria Ludovica herself was a key member of the war party, exerting her not inconsiderable influence on her doting husband.

On the other hand, Stadion’s task was greatly complicated by the diverse and disordered nature of the war faction. While Stadion and others aimed to turn back the clock, to restore the ‘old order of things’, Maria Ludovica and most of the Habsburgs were primarily concerned with dynastic security; the principal interest of the d’Este brothers, for example, was a return to their Italian possessions and status. Others, such as Archduke Johann, were motivated by romantic nationalist notions of a pan-Teutonic battle with Gaul as well as pragmatic desires to strengthen the Austrian state and to regain the lost Tyrol.¹⁵ Only loathing for Napoleon united these disparate elements.¹⁶ The credibility of the war party was also sapped somewhat by the general lack of military experience among its members and the fact that many of them were court creatures who would not be in the ranks trading lead with Napoleon’s veterans.¹⁷ Furthermore, an influential ‘peace party’ centred around the Archdukes Rainer and Joseph also had the Kaiser’s ear. These men advocated accommodation with France and a reduction in military expenditures to preserve peace and save the empire from its grave financial woes. The peace party drew important support from Archduke Charles. As the Habsburg generalissimus, Charles’s noble rank, military prestige, and adamant refusal to hurl his slowly reforming army into a new struggle proved insurmountable hurdles to the war party’s passionate calls for confrontation.

At the centre of this policy controversy was Kaiser Franz.¹⁸ Indecisive and uncertain, he was, as Napoleon said, easily swayed by the last person to brief him and was more comfortable meddling in bureaucratic minutiae than guiding his huge and complex realm through the troubled waters of early nineteenth-century Europe.¹⁹ Principally concerned with securing his dynasty’s future, he vacillated, resisting Stadion’s efforts to energise the empire for war, but also spurning the reform initiatives of the peace party. For Franz, the danger seemed neither imminent nor deadly enough to overcome his distaste for major decisions. This state of affairs—the Kaiser temporising, the war party relegated to a noisy but marginal role, Stadion frustrated by his inability to effect dramatic alterations in imperial policy—might have continued indefinitely in Vienna had Napoleon not seized an opportunity to interfere in the affairs of Spain.

SPRING 1808: RELATIVES, CREATURES, AND GENERALS

Events on the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 had a sensational impact in Vienna, sharply accentuating Stadion’s fears but also seeming to open the door for Austrian action. Since Tilsit, Napoleon had been manoeuvring to...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Sources and Conventions
• CHAPTER 1 - War Is Unavoidable
• CHAPTER 2 - What Do They Intend?
• CHAPTER 3 - Austria Would Not Be So Foolish
• CHAPTER 4 - It Is War
• CHAPTER 5 - Eight Days in April, I: The War Opens and the Tide Turns
• CHAPTER 6 - Eight Days in April, II: Four More Victories
• Intermezzo - THE FIRST CAMPAIGN
• Appendices - INTRODUCTORY NOTE: UNIT STRENGTHS AND ORDERS OF BATTLE
• APPENDIX 2 - Orders of Battle for the April Campaign in Bavaria
• APPENDIX 3 - Orders of Battle for the Battle of Abensberg and the Pursuit to Landshut, , ,
• APPENDIX 4 - Orders of Battle for the Battle of Eggmühl, , , , , , , , , , ,
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliographic Note
• Index