Battle of Fontenoy

Among the biggest clashes of the War of the Austrian Succession, Fontenoy took place on 11 May 1745 close to Tournai, a town then in the Austrian Netherlands and today in Belgium. There Marshal Maurice de Saxe and his French army beat off a coalition force of British, Hanoverian, Dutch and Austrian troops commanded by the young Duke of Cumberland. Each side numbered roughly 50,000 men, and the victory opened the way for the French conquest of the Austrian Netherlands.

The conflict had its roots in 1740, when Emperor Charles VI died and his daughter Maria Theresa took over the Habsburg lands. France, Prussia and others backed a rival claimant, while Britain, Hanover and the Dutch Republic joined Austria in the so-called Pragmatic Army. By 1745 France was close to bankruptcy and wanted a decisive blow that would end the war. Saxe persuaded Louis XV that the Low Countries offered the best chance of defeating Britain, whose money sustained the coalition, and in late April he laid siege to Tournai, a Dutch-garrisoned fortress on the Scheldt. As he expected, the allies marched to relieve it.

Saxe kept about 22,000 men at work on the siege and drew up the bulk of his army a short distance away on a ridge running between the villages of Antoing and Fontenoy and the woods of Barry. Doubting that his infantry could match the allied foot soldiers in open battle, he had the villages fortified and redoubts built, so that any attack on his centre would come under fire from several sides. The allies, misled by intelligence that the French had fewer than 30,000 men, reconnoitred hastily and missed one of these redoubts.

The allied attack on 11 May went badly from the start. Dutch assaults on Fontenoy were driven back by fire from the village, and a British brigade under Richard Ingoldsby, ordered to clear the woods and take the hidden redoubt, hesitated and received conflicting instructions. Around midday Cumberland sent forward his central column, perhaps 15,000 British and Hanoverian infantry, which climbed the slope in good order despite heavy losses. A famous story, first told by Voltaire decades later and of doubtful accuracy, has British officers inviting the French Guards to fire first. The first British volley shattered the French front line, and for a time Louis XV, watching with his son, was urged to leave the field. Saxe insisted that the battle was not lost. Repeated cavalry charges held the column while French artillery was brought up to fire into it at close range, and a general assault that included the Irish Brigade and the elite household cavalry finally forced it back.

The allied infantry withdrew in good order towards Ath, covered by their cavalry, but many wounded were later captured. The French are thought to have lost about 7,000 to 8,000 men, dead and wounded together, while allied casualties, prisoners included, are put anywhere from 7,400 to 12,000; no battle in Western Europe had cost so much blood since Malplaquet in 1709. Not since Saint Louis had a French king been able to say he had beaten the English in the field; Louis XV now could, and Voltaire celebrated the feat in verse.

Tournai surrendered on 20 June, and Ostend and Nieuport soon followed. The Jacobite rising of 1745 in Britain then drew British troops home, allowing Saxe to overrun most of the Austrian Netherlands over the next two years. Yet the British naval blockade was strangling the French economy, and under the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 Louis XV handed his conquests back for little in return, giving rise to the French expression "as stupid as the peace". The battle made Saxe's name; Cumberland was blamed for ignoring advice.

Irish nationalists later celebrated the role of the Irish Brigade, and a memorial to it stands in Fontenoy. In 1968 the French army erected a monument at nearby Vezon carrying words attributed to Louis XV as he surveyed the field: the blood of enemies, he said, is still the blood of men.

Our 1783 map shows the Austrian Netherlands back under the Habsburg Monarchy after the French withdrawal, and our 1715 map shows the region earlier in the century.