Battle of Austerlitz (1805): Napoleon's Greatest Victory

The Battle of Austerlitz, fought on 2 December 1805 in Moravia, was Napoleon’s most celebrated victory. In a single day his Grande Armee shattered the larger combined army of Russia and Austria, forcing Austria out of the war and breaking the Third Coalition. Because the emperors of France, Russia and Austria were all present, it is also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors.

Background: the Third Coalition

Britain and France had been at war again since 1803. In 1805 Britain organised the Third Coalition with Austria, Russia, Sweden and Naples to contain Napoleon, who had crowned himself Emperor of the French in December 1804 (see the coronation of Napoleon) and King of Italy in May 1805.

Napoleon had gathered a large army around Boulogne for an invasion of Britain. In late August 1805 he abandoned the plan and marched the army, now called the Grande Armee, rapidly across Germany. In October it encircled the Austrian army of General Karl Mack at Ulm, which capitulated on 20 October. The next day, far away off southern Spain, the British navy won the Battle of Trafalgar, ending any French hope of invading Britain.

Napoleon pushed on down the Danube and entered Vienna on 13 November 1805. The Russian army under General Mikhail Kutuzov retreated north-east into Moravia, where it joined Austrian forces and a second Russian army near Olmutz (Olomouc). Tsar Alexander I arrived to take personal charge, and Emperor Francis II of Austria accompanied him.

Napoleon’s trap

Napoleon’s position was risky. His army was far from France, his lines of supply were long, and Prussia was considering joining the coalition. He needed a quick, decisive battle, and he set out to provoke one.

He occupied a position west of the village of Austerlitz, then deliberately gave up the commanding Pratzen Heights in the centre and made his right wing look weak. He also gave the impression, through envoys and outposts, that he was anxious to avoid battle. Many young officers around the tsar became convinced that the French were vulnerable. Kutuzov and some Austrian generals urged caution and suggested waiting for reinforcements, including the Archduke Charles’s army returning from Italy and a possible Prussian intervention, but Alexander wanted a victory and the allied army was also short of food in a region it had already stripped.

The allied plan, drawn up largely by the Austrian chief of staff Franz von Weyrother, was to send massive columns from the Pratzen against the weak French right, cut Napoleon off from the road to Vienna and roll up his army. This was exactly what Napoleon hoped they would do. As the allies moved south, their centre on the heights would be weakened, and Napoleon planned to strike it. Meanwhile Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout’s III Corps was force-marching from Vienna, covering roughly 110 kilometres in about two days, to reinforce the threatened right.

The battle

The battle began early on 2 December, the first anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation. Thick fog covered the valleys. Allied columns attacked the villages of Telnitz and Sokolnitz on the French right, where outnumbered French troops, reinforced by Davout’s arriving divisions, fought a stubborn defensive battle along the Goldbach stream.

At around 9 a.m., as the fog lifted and the sun broke through, Napoleon ordered Marshal Nicolas Soult to attack the Pratzen. The divisions of Generals Saint-Hilaire and Vandamme climbed the slopes and found the heights only partly held, because most allied troops had already moved south. Kutuzov tried to hold the plateau, and fierce fighting followed. The sudden sunlight that morning became famous in French legend as the “sun of Austerlitz”.

By late morning the French held the Pratzen and had split the allied army in two. The Russian Imperial Guard counter-attacked, and its cavalry briefly routed some French infantry before the cavalry of the French Imperial Guard, led by Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bessieres and General Jean Rapp, drove it back.

In the north, Marshal Jean Lannes’s infantry and Marshal Joachim Murat’s cavalry fought the Russian right wing under Prince Pyotr Bagration around the Santon hill and the Brunn-Olmutz road. Bagration was pushed back but withdrew in reasonable order.

In the afternoon Napoleon turned the troops on the Pratzen south against the rear of the allied left wing under General Friedrich Wilhelm von Buxhoeveden, which was still fighting Davout. Trapped between French forces and a chain of partly frozen ponds near the village of Satschan, the allied left collapsed. Thousands surrendered, and others escaped across narrow causeways or the ice. By nightfall the allied army was in full retreat. Darkness and the exhaustion of the French troops after a long day of fighting allowed much of the beaten army to escape eastwards towards Hungary rather than being destroyed completely.

Key people

• Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, who planned and directed the battle personally.
• Tsar Alexander I, who overruled more cautious advice to attack.
• Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Austria, who sought an armistice two days later.
• Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian commander, who had doubted the plan but was overruled.
• Marshal Soult, whose corps stormed the Pratzen Heights.
• Marshal Davout, whose forced march and defence held the French right.

By the numbers

Figures are estimates and differ between historians, but all agree that the allies lost around a third of their army.

Consequences

The defeat shattered the coalition. Francis II met Napoleon on 4 December, an armistice was signed on 6 December, and Alexander withdrew the Russian army. On 26 December 1805 Austria signed the Treaty of Pressburg (Bratislava). It gave Venetia to Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy, Tyrol and Vorarlberg to Bavaria, and other lands to France’s German allies, and it required Austria to pay a large indemnity.

The settlement transformed Germany. In July 1806 Napoleon created the Confederation of the Rhine, a league of German states under French protection. On 6 August 1806 Francis gave up the title of Holy Roman Emperor, ending an institution that had existed for about a thousand years. He continued to rule as Francis I, Emperor of Austria.

In Britain the news was a heavy blow to the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, who died in January 1806. Prussia, which had been on the point of joining the coalition, instead came to terms with France, before going to war with Napoleon later in 1806 and suffering its own catastrophe at the Battles of Jena and Auerstedt.

Myths and facts

• The drowning in the ponds. Napoleon’s official bulletin claimed that thousands of Russians drowned when French artillery fire broke the ice on the Satschan ponds. When the ponds were drained after the battle, reports say only a few human bodies and around 150 dead horses were found. Some soldiers did die in the water, but the scale was greatly exaggerated for propaganda.
• “Roll up that map.” Pitt is often said to have pointed at a map of Europe after hearing of Austerlitz and said it would not be wanted for ten years. The story was recorded later by his family and biographers, and its exact wording is uncertain.
• A battle won by luck in the fog. The fog helped hide French movements, but the victory came from Napoleon’s deliberate plan, the speed of Davout’s march and the allies’ decision to weaken their own centre.

Legacy

Austerlitz became the model of a decisive battle, studied in military academies for two centuries. Napoleon’s proclamation to his troops after the battle praised their courage and promised that a soldier would only need to say he had been at Austerlitz to be greeted as a brave man.

The victory was celebrated in Paris in stone and bronze. The Vendome Column was cast partly from the bronze of captured cannon, and the Arc de Triomphe was commissioned in 1806 to honour the Grande Armee. A Paris railway station and bridge bear the battle’s name. In literature, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace gives a famous account of the battle through the eyes of the wounded Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.

The site near Slavkov u Brna is today a protected memorial landscape with the Peace Monument (Mohyla miru) on the Pratzen and an annual re-enactment each December.

The triumph also had a darker side. It encouraged Napoleon’s belief that any problem could be solved by a decisive battle, a confidence that would eventually lead him to the disaster of the invasion of Russia in 1812.

Timeline

• 1805, April - August: Britain, Russia and Austria form the Third Coalition.
• 1805, late August: Napoleon marches the Grande Armee from the Channel coast towards the Danube.
• 1805, 20 October: Mack’s Austrian army capitulates at Ulm.
• 1805, 21 October: British victory at Trafalgar.
• 1805, 13 November: French troops enter Vienna.
• 1805, 2 December: Battle of Austerlitz.
• 1805, 4 December: Napoleon and Francis II meet; an armistice follows on 6 December.
• 1805, 26 December: Treaty of Pressburg.
• 1806, 6 August: Dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.

Why it matters

Austerlitz made Napoleon master of central Europe, destroyed the Third Coalition and led directly to the end of the Holy Roman Empire. It remains the classic example of a commander luring a stronger enemy into a trap and defeating it in a single day.