“Overshadowed by the scale and drama of Wagram, the ensuing week is usually treated as a hasty coda to the war. Some histories do not even mention the fighting at Znaim.”

By John H. Gill

THERE IS ALWAYS something new to uncover about the Napoleonic era.

Despite innumerable books, chapters and articles written about the period, there still remains so much to explore. This includes not only activities involving the emperor’s many subordinates, but even entire battles in which Napoleon himself was involved.

One of these is the Battle of Znaim that ended the 1809 war between France and Austria.[i]

The Franco-Austrian war of 1809, sometimes called “the Wagram Campaign” after its greatest battle, came at the mid-point of Napoleon’s imperial career. The dramatic triumphs of Austerlitz 1805, Jena 1806 and Friedland 1807 lay in the past; the Russian disaster of 1812 still in the future.

The war can be thought of as being fought in three phases or campaigns.

The first began in April 1809 with Austrian forces invading Napoleon’s ally Bavaria (most of the German states at the time were allied with France under the umbrella of Napoleon’s “Confederation of the Rhine”). At their head was the Archduke Charles, younger brother of the Habsburg Kaiser Franz and Austria’s best general. The French emperor, arriving hastily from Paris, repelled the Austrian offensive in what he always considered “the most brilliant and skillful maneuvers” of his career.[ii]

The second phase saw Napoleon drive rapidly down the Danube valley to capture Vienna, but it ended with his repulse at the Battle of Aspern-Essling on May 21 and 22 when he tried to cross the river to get at the Austrian main army.

A lull of almost six weeks followed, with the two principal armies warily eyeing one another across the Danube. A number of historically interesting secondary campaigns occurred during this period (notably in Italy, Poland and Hungary), but relative quiet reigned on the main front. The Austrians vacillated, unable to decide how to exploit their success at Aspern-Essling, while Napoleon completed meticulous preparations for a second assault across the river barrier.

Napoleon finally took his army over the Danube during a violent thunderstorm on the night of July 4. This successful operation, one of military history’s greatest river crossings, was prelude to the titanic Battle of Wagram.

Wagram, fought on July 5 and 6, saw more than 300,000 combatants with nearly 1,000 guns engage each other along a 22-kilometre firing line for two long, hot days. Second only to the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 as far as the number of troops involved, the clash resulted in more than 38,800 Austrian and 35,000 French casualties, but did not produce the sort of dramatic victory Napoleon had sought. Unlike Austerlitz or Jena, the enemy army remained intact and retired in good order.

As one of the Bonaparte’s closest associates recalled: “The emperor was indifferently content with the Battle of Wagram; he wanted a second representation of Marengo, Austerlitz, or Jena and he had taken great care to obtain such a result; but far from this, the Austrian army was intact; it was departing to throw itself into some position that would necessitate new planning efforts to bring about an engagement followed by better results.”[iii]

With the Austrian army still a viable force, therefore, the outcome of the war remained undecided despite the French victory at Wagram. What followed was a week of retreat, pursuit, tough rear-guard actions and a major battle culminating in an unexpected ceasefire and armistice outside the charming Moravian town of Znaim (now Znjomo) on the evening of July 11. Moreover, the vicious combat was accompanied by tentative peace overtures between French and Austrian representatives and bitter debates within Austrian leadership circles on whether to seek an immediate cessation of hostilities or fight on to some undetermined end.

Its centrality to the outcome of the 1809 war and its inherent political-military interest notwithstanding, this period of pursuit after Wagram and the concluding Battle of Znaim are seldom addressed. Overshadowed by the scale and drama of Wagram, the ensuing week is usually treated as a hasty coda to the war. Some histories do not even mention the fighting at Znaim.

The retreat, the Battle at Znaim and the simultaneous diplomatic contacts, however, are another example of contingency in history. That is, Austria’s leaders, despite the loss at Wagram could have decided to fight on, instead, they elected to accept an armistice that led to peace. This week of pursuit and battle helps explain why.

The French were slow off the mark in initiating their pursuit on July 7 and Archduke Charles was able to extricate his wounded army from the battlefield.

He headed north into Moravia, hoping to establish himself in a good defensive position while appealing to his brother to make peace at once. In his mind, the army was the surety of the empire and the dynasty, should it be destroyed, Napoleon would erase the Habsburg monarchy.

Others at court, however, saw any move towards peace as humiliating and dangerous. They fervently urged Kaiser Franz to continue the war, to go down with sword in hand if need be. Bitter debates over war and peace thus poisoned Habsburg councils during this critical period as the Kaiser dithered and policy drifted.

Finally, to Charles’ immense relief, Franz consented to send Prince Johann von Liechtenstein to sound out Napoleon on possible peace terms. Combat operations, of course, did not stop to await these deliberations and recriminations within the Austrian court, and by 10 July when Liechtenstein rode off on his mission, the pursuing French had caught up with Charles’ army at Znaim.

Charles did not wish to fight at Znaim; in his view, it did not represent a proper defensive position. But he had no choice when French and Bavarian troops under future Marshal August Marmont appeared unexpectedly on his flank on July 10 and threatened his line of retreat. Marmont thought he was only facing a rear guard and impetuously attacked, but soon discovered that his 17,000 men were facing more than 60,000 Austrians. Nonetheless, he boldly, perhaps rashly, decided to brass it out, keeping up the pressure to “impose” on the enemy and hoping to hold Charles in place until Napoleon could arrive with reinforcements. This meant that heavy fighting raged all afternoon, with Marmont’s Bavarian division losing 900 men in the contest for a key village, the highest single day loss for the Bavarian contingent in the entire war.

Napoleon appeared on the vine-covered slopes above Znaim on the morning of July 11 with some 7,000 cavalry. Around the same time, part of Marshal André Massena’s corps reached the field.

By now, there were some 100,000 soldiers around Znaim, but the French, despite the reinforcements, were still outnumbered two to one.

To bring about the decisive battle, which would create the crushing victory he sought to end the war, Napoleon needed more infantry. Some 50,000 men were indeed slogging their way towards Znaim in forced marches, but they could not arrive before nightfall. Napoleon thus contented himself with intense but limited pinning attacks on the French right to lock the Austrians in place in hopes of a decisive battle on the following day.

Massena, on the French left, however, was not so restrained. Immediately upon his arrival, he resolutely launched his French and Baden troops in an attack that almost reached the city’s gates. At that moment, nature and the Austrians intervened: a tremendous thunderstorm struck just as a battalion of determined Austrian grenadiers hurled themselves in a counterattack against the advancing French.

Amid a pelting rain, the French fell back in confusion, but the grenadiers suffered a surprise of their own when French heavy cavalry suddenly countercharged. Almost all of the grenadiers were cut down or captured, and the French, once again, almost gained the city, only to be held off by a stalwart battalion of Austrian militiamen.

Although night was now falling, both armies had been roused to a battle fury. The French were about to renew their attack when a staff officer from each side rode between the lines calling out “Ceasefire! Ceasefire!” Both of these men were wounded and it took nearly an hour for the firing to fade away, but the war of 1809 was over.

So, what had happened? What had brought about such a sudden and unexpected end to the hostilities?

On July 10, Charles had sent an officer to Marmont requesting a ceasefire so Liechtenstein could meet Napoleon. He hoped by doing so, he could escape with his weary army during the night. Marmont had brusquely rejected this proposal, but on July 11, Napoleon, decided to accept it. The French emperor feared that the Austrians would slip his grasp, dragging out a war he wanted to end quickly. He could be satisfied with an unquestionably defeated Austria even if he had not achieved the sort of battlefield victory that had capped the wars of 1805, 1806 and 1807.

“Enough blood has flowed,” he told an impromptu council of war and officers from both sides were thus sent riding forth to halt the fighting.[iv]

With the local ceasefire in place, both chiefs of staff met to discuss a broader armistice. For Napoleon, the terms had to be no less stern than those imposed in 1805: Wagram must be seen across Europe as great a triumph as Austerlitz. The document was drawn up and approved by Napoleon before Liechtenstein even arrived.

When the prince rode into Napoleon’s camp sometime after midnight, therefore, he was faced with an unpleasant fait accompli. The terms were indeed tough. Pending a final peace settlement, the French would remain in occupation of huge swathes of Habsburg territory, Austria would give up a number of key fortress and would withdraw its troops from several of the secondary theatres of war. The stringent stipulations notwithstanding, Charles accepted the document as drafted. He knew that the terms would excite outrage at court, but he was convinced that his army would be destroyed if forced to fight again and with it would go the dynasty.

Charles now had to undertake the awkward task of informing his brother the Kaiser of the battle and the armistice.

“Between acceptance of this ultimatum and the battle, for which we clearly could see that the French had made all preparations against my far inferior army, there was no choice,” he wrote, “In order to save the army, I had to make use of the authority that Your Majesty had granted me to conclude an armistice in order not to leave Your Majesty and the monarchy at the mercy of the conqueror.”

Franz was not in a forgiving mood. Surrounded by those who harboured illusions of Austrian strength and advocated continuing the war, he hectored his brother with petty and demeaning letters until Charles, weary, ill and frustrated, submitted his resignation. The Kaiser accepted with unseemly haste in a single sentence: “I regard the resignation of command of the army as a sacrifice for the state by Your Grace and only regret that the state thereby loses a courageous field commander, nonetheless find myself moved, in the current circumstances, to accept.”[v] Charles, the Habsburg state’s finest senior commander, never again held a field command.

Peace negotiations dragged on for three months after Znaim as Austrian factions debated the prospects of resuming hostilities or accepting Napoleon’s stiff terms. But with the French in occupation of his capital and much of his most valuable territory, with his army disheartened, his best general sidelined, the weather turning foul and no international allies, Franz eventually succumbed to the inevitable. When Liechtenstein, as his emissary, signed a treaty in Vienna on Oct. 14, therefore, he had little choice but to accede to its terms. If the treaty was not concluded until October, however, the War of 1809 actually came to its end on the night of July 11 to 12  on the hills outside the little town of Znaim.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John H. Gill is the author of The Battle of Znaim: Napoleon, the Habsburgs and the End of the 1809 War, forthcoming from Greenhill and Pen & Sword Books. A retired U.S. Army officer, he has published extensively on the Napoleonic era, especially with regard to Napoleon’s German allies, including 1809: Thunder on the Danube (paperback edition, London, 2014), A Soldier for Napoleon (editor, London, 2016) and With Eagles to Glory (paperback edition, London, 2018), all available from Pen & Sword.

[i] See the author’s Thunder on the Danube (3 vols., London, 2014) for a detailed history of the 1809 war.

[ii] “Notes sur le manuscrit venu de Sainte-Hélène,” in Napoleon I, Correspondance de Napoléon Ier publiée par ordre de l’Empereur Napoléon III (Paris, 1858–70), XXXI, 235.

[iii] Anne-Jean-Marie-René Savary, Mémoires du Duc de Rovigo (Paris, 1828), IV, 182–3.

[iv] Jean-Jacques Pelet, Mémoires sur la Guerre de 1809 en Allemagne (Paris, 1824–6), IV, 275–8.

[v] Both quotations from Charles to Franz, 23 July 1809 with Kaiser’s 29 July marginalia, Hungarian National Archives, P300 Carton 18; facsimile in Oscar Criste, Erzherzog Carl von Oesterreich (Vienna, 1912), III, 276–7.