Battle of Hanau

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Battle of Hanau lasted just two days, the 30th and the 31st of October 1813, yet it decided whether Napoleon Bonaparte would escape Germany alive. Standing between him and France was a force of 42,000 Austro-Bavarian soldiers under General Karl Philipp von Wrede, dug in along the Kinzig river outside the city of Hanau. Napoleon, retreating from the catastrophic defeat at Leipzig, had already lost tens of thousands of men. Now he faced a blockade on the one road that led home. How did he break through? And what did it cost him? The answers lie in a single afternoon of cannon fire, a fatal flaw in Wrede's deployment, and a sarcastic remark from Napoleon that would become one of his most quoted lines.

• 2. After Leipzig

  ›

  The Battle of Leipzig, which began on the 16th of October 1813 and raged for three days, was the largest and bloodiest engagement of the Napoleonic Wars. Its outcome forced Napoleon to abandon central Germany entirely. He ordered his army to retreat westward at great speed, fearing that his battered forces might be caught and destroyed if they lingered. His goal was the Rhine, where shorter lines of communication and a protected rear would give him room to recover. Napoleon installed his headquarters at Erfurt on the 23rd of October and began reorganising his scattered corps. On the 26th of October he sent orders directing them toward Frankfurt via Eisenach and Fulda, with Mainz, on the Rhine, as their final destination. The coalition armies, though victorious at Leipzig, had suffered such enormous losses themselves that they could not mount an effective pursuit. Their failure to press harder in those crucial days after the battle was the one piece of luck Napoleon's retreating army received.

• 3. Bavaria Changes Sides

  ›

  Bavaria had been a French ally, but the Treaty of Ried, concluded just before Leipzig, brought it into the Sixth Coalition. That diplomatic shift had immediate military consequences. It freed a combined Austro-Bavarian army of between 45,000 and 50,000 soldiers to move into Napoleon's rear. Their commander, Karl Philipp von Wrede, occupied Würzburg in Franconia with little difficulty. The small French garrison there chose not to resist and instead barricaded themselves in the citadel, leaving the town to the enemy without a fight. From Würzburg, Wrede pushed toward Hanau, which sat astride one of Napoleon's main retreat routes. His advance guard reached the city on the 28th of October and seized it, blocking the French road to Frankfurt. Wrede believed the French army was completely disorganised and estimated he would face no more than 20,000 men. Both assumptions were wrong. He also believed the main coalition army, known as the Army of Bohemia, was close behind Napoleon and would arrive to support him. In reality, it was far away and out of contact.

• 4. Wrede's Fatal Disposition

  ›

  On the 29th of October, Wrede spent the day arranging his 42,000 men with care. He deployed in a narrow, deep formation intended for defense, placing the bulk of his force along the Kinzig river with the water at their backs. His left covered the Frankfurt road, the very route Napoleon needed. On his right, the divisions of Elbracht and Trautenberg held the southern bank of the Kinzig, while Beckers's Bavarian division straddled the river itself. One Austrian regiment, the Szekler, just two battalions strong, along with detached skirmishers, was placed in an advanced position in the Lamboy forest. Napoleon spent that same night at Isenburg castle near Gelnhausen and received detailed intelligence about Wrede's preparations. He studied the position and identified at once its central problem: the Kinzig sat directly behind most of Wrede's army. Any forced retreat would mean crossing the river under fire, a potentially catastrophic situation. It was then that Napoleon delivered his famous observation, recorded at the time: "I have made Wrede a Count but it was beyond my power to make him a General." To exploit the weakness, however, Napoleon still had to defeat an enemy who had chosen the ground, had time to prepare it, and outnumbered him in infantry, cavalry, and artillery.

• 5. The Battle Itself

  ›

  On the 30th of October, Napoleon committed roughly 20,000 men to the fight, drawn from Marshal MacDonald's corps, Marshal Victor's II Corps, Sebastiani's II Cavalry Corps with some 3,000 sabres, the Imperial Guard cavalry under Nansouty with around 4,000 sabres, and the entire Imperial Guard infantry with 52 cannons. Many of the French line battalions had been reduced to around 100 men each. Dense forest on the eastern side of Wrede's positions allowed the French to advance and make close contact almost unseen. By midday, Victor and MacDonald had cleared the trees in front of the allied centre. General Drouot then found a track through the forest that could bear artillery, and within three hours the Grenadiers of the Old Guard had swept allied troops from the area. Drouot deployed 50 cannons, supported by Guard cavalry and Sébastiani's horse. The resulting bombardment silenced Wrede's 28 guns. French cavalry then drove back the allied horsemen on Wrede's left and swung around to strike the flank of his centre. The centre began to fall back toward the Kinzig, taking heavy casualties along the river's edge. On the right wing, Wrede's troops attempted to cross the single bridge over the Kinzig to reinforce the crumbling centre, and many drowned trying. Wrede managed to rally surviving troops into a defensive line running from Lamboy Bridge to the town itself, but during the night the allies abandoned Hanau entirely. The French occupied the city on the 31st of October with almost no resistance.

• 6. The Price of Victory

  ›

  Wrede's force suffered roughly 9,000 casualties in the two-day engagement. Napoleon's army lost fewer men in direct fighting, but some 10,000 French stragglers fell into allied hands in the period between the 28th and the 31st of October. Napoleon himself arrived in Frankfurt on the afternoon of the 31st of October and made no effort to pursue Wrede once the road was clear. The French army reached Frankfurt on the 2nd of November 1813, placing them just 20 miles from their relatively safe rear base at Mainz. That closeness to Mainz mattered: it gave Napoleon's depleted force the breathing space to recover and organise a defense against the invasion of France that would follow in 1814. On the 5th of November, Tsar Alexander I marched his own troops into Frankfurt, a signal of how quickly the coalition was moving to consolidate its hold on Germany. For Bavaria's political leadership, the outcome of the battle was almost beside the point. Whether Wrede won or lost mattered less than the fact that Bavaria had visibly fought against Napoleon, demonstrating its commitment to the new coalition alignment.

• 7. Memory and Commemoration

  ›

  Just over a month after the battle, on the 8th of December 1813, Beethoven conducted the premiere of his Symphony No. 7 in Vienna at a charity concert for soldiers wounded at Hanau. The link between that performance and the battle is preserved in the historical record. In Hanau itself, five memorials have survived at locations including Lamboystrasse, Karl-Marx-Strasse, Robert Blum Strasse, and two sites at the Kinzig bridge. The battle is also engraved on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris among the victories attributed to Napoleon. Karl Philipp von Wrede, despite his defeat, was honoured for his conduct with four decorations: the Order of Leopold and the Commander's Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa from Austria, and the Order of Alexander Nevsky and the Order of St. George from Russia. In 2015, the excavation of the battlefield site at Hanau uncovered the remains of around 200 French soldiers who had fallen in the fighting more than two centuries earlier.