Battle of Austerlitz

In exile on St. Helena, Napoleon was notably sparse in his comments on this battle of the 1805 campaign. To some companions, Napoleon never mentioned Austerlitz at all. This is remarkable in that historians typically picture Austerlitz as Napoleon's most spectacular victory. Indeed, it seems that Napoleon himself also thought of the battle in this way, because he referred to it repeatedly at critical moments later in his military career, for example, at Borodino, where Napoleon told associates he felt he could see "the sun of Austerlitz."

The Battle of Austerlitz came about after Napoleon had seized Vienna in the wake of his encirclement of an Austrian army at Ulm earlier in this campaign (October 1805). The French were in pursuit of Austrian forces; the latter reconstituted their army by making a junction with an approaching Russian force. The combined Russo-Austrian army under General Mikhail Kutuzov, with 85,000 men and 278 guns, advanced through Moravia toward Vienna. Kutuzov was accompanied by both the Austrian emperor Francis I and the Russian tsar Alexander, resulting in command conflicts that reduced the effectiveness of the combined army. A plan for an outflanking movement by the right wing was adopted despite Kutuzov's opposition. That became the gambit attempted on December 2.

Anticipating such a move, Napoleon massed the bulk of his army, which totaled seventy-three thousand troops and 139 guns, on the opposite flank and in his right center, and sent these forces in to attack when he judged the Russo-Austrian army had become overextended and had denuded its center. The French attack broke the allied left wing and gained key heights behind the Russo-Austrian attack force, which was then pinned against marshland. The allied army disintegrated, obliging Emperor Francis to negotiate peace with the French. French losses totaled nine thousand against allied casualties of twenty-seven thousand, including the loss of 180 guns and forty-five colors.

Austerlitz has gained a reputation as a classic example of operational art. It is arguable, however, that Ulm, where twenty-nine thousand Austrians were forced to surrender with virtually no battle at all, represents an even greater achievement.

The Reader's Companion to Military History. Edited by Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.