Battle of Austerlitz

The Battle of Austerlitz was fought on 2 December 1805 near the Moravian town of Austerlitz, today Slavkov u Brna in the Czech Republic. The French army of the emperor Napoleon defeated a larger combined army of Russia and Austria, led in person by Tsar Alexander I and Emperor Francis II, which is why it was also called the Battle of the Three Emperors. The victory ended the War of the Third Coalition and is often counted among Napoleon's greatest tactical achievements.

Britain and France had been at war again since May 1803. In 1804 and 1805 the British prime minister William Pitt the Younger built a new coalition against France, and by 1805 Russia and Austria had joined. Napoleon, crowned emperor of the French in December 1804, abandoned his planned invasion of Britain and marched his Grande Armée from the Channel coast to the Rhine. In October he trapped an Austrian army at Ulm, where 23,000 men surrendered on 20 October, the day before the French and Spanish fleets were defeated at the Battle of Trafalgar. In November the French entered Vienna.

The Russian army under General Mikhail Kutuzov retreated north-east to join the remaining Austrian forces near Olmütz. Napoleon's lines of supply were long, and Prussia might join his enemies, so he needed a quick battle. He set out to look weak. He offered talks, appeared eager for peace, and ordered Marshal Soult to give up the high ground of the Pratzen Heights near Austerlitz in apparent disorder. Kutuzov preferred to keep retreating, but the tsar and his Austrian chief of staff, Franz von Weyrother, decided to attack.

Figures for the armies vary between historians. The French had roughly 65,000 to 75,000 men, depending on whether some 7,000 men of Marshal Davout's corps, still marching up from Vienna, are counted. The allies had perhaps 73,000 to 89,000, about seven in ten of them Russian, and far more guns.

Fighting began at about 8 in the morning, when allied columns attacked the deliberately weakened French right around the villages of Telnitz and Sokolnitz. Davout's men, arriving after a forced march, held the line there as the villages changed hands several times. To strengthen this attack the allies stripped troops from the Pratzen Heights in their centre. Soon after 9, as the morning mist cleared, Napoleon sent Soult's corps up the slopes. After hard fighting the French took the heights, splitting the allied army. A counter-attack by the Russian Imperial Guard was beaten off by Napoleon's Guard cavalry, and in the north Marshal Lannes drove back Prince Bagration. In the afternoon the French turned south and broke the allied left, and the whole allied army fled. Some retreating Russians crossed the frozen Satschan ponds under French artillery fire and drowned when the ice broke, though how many died there is disputed.

French losses were roughly 9,000 killed, wounded and missing. Allied losses are usually given at between 27,000 and 36,000, including some 12,000 to 20,000 prisoners, as well as 186 cannon.

Austria agreed to an armistice at once and signed the Peace of Pressburg on 26 December 1805, losing territory in Italy and Germany and paying a large indemnity. The Russian army was allowed to go home. In 1806 Napoleon organised many German states into the Confederation of the Rhine, and Francis dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, remaining emperor of Austria. The peace did not last: Prussia went to war with France in 1806, and Russia and Britain fought on as part of the wider Napoleonic Wars.

Our 1800 map shows the Holy Roman Empire and the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy shortly before the battle, while the 1815 map shows Europe after Napoleon's final defeat. The First French Empire fell between those two dates.