Battle of Znaim

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Battle of Znaim began because one French marshal refused to wait for a ceasefire. It was the 10th of July, 1809, and the Austrian and French armies had already fought themselves to exhaustion at Wagram. Archduke Charles was pulling his forces north toward Bohemia. Napoleon's men, battered themselves, had not yet given pursuit. Then Marshal Auguste de Marmont arrived at the town of Znaim, about 80 kilometers north of Vienna, looked at what he thought was a small rearguard, and attacked. He was facing five enemy corps. What followed over two days was some of the most confused and costly fighting of the entire Fifth Coalition campaign, a battle fought after a ceasefire had already been proposed, over a town that neither side could decisively take. How did a rearguard action spiral into a full engagement? And what finally brought the guns silent along the river Thaya?

• 2. A Rearguard Misread

  ›

  Archduke Charles had a specific and limited purpose at Znaim. He needed time to move his army's baggage train safely toward Moravia, so he set a rearguard position near the town to buy that time. Marmont's combined French and Bavarian corps, following the course of the river Thaya, were the first of Napoleon's troops to reach the area. Marmont sent his Bavarian troops to storm the village of Tesswitz, south of Znaim, while his remaining forces attacked the village of Zuckerhandl. The Bavarians took Tesswitz, but Austrian reinforcements drove them out. Marmont ordered a second assault; the village was retaken, then lost again. By the time the day ended, Tesswitz had changed hands multiple times, and the contest there would stand as the hardest fighting the Bavarians saw across the entire campaign. Marmont had hoped to swing his cavalry around behind the Austrian rearguard, but when his horsemen reached the high ground above Tesswitz, they found themselves facing five enemy corps and were forced back by a large body of Austrian cuirassiers.

• 3. Forty Thousand Against One Corps

  ›

  By the time the full scale of the situation became clear, Marmont had roughly 10,000 men engaged against 40,000 Austrian troops. André Masséna, seeing Marmont in an impossible position, had no practical choice but to bring his corps in to support him. By the 11th of July, Masséna's forces had joined the fight, but the Austrians had used the time to reinforce their position around the town itself. Archduke Charles placed his forces in a strong defensive line holding the north bank of the river Thaya and the town of Znaim. Napoleon arrived at Tesswitz at 10:00 in the morning. Even with additional cavalry and artillery in tow, he concluded that his total force was not strong enough for a full-scale assault. His plan was to use Masséna's corps to pin the Austrians throughout the day and wait for the corps of marshals Louis-Nicolas Davout and Nicolas Oudinot, expected to arrive early on the twelfth. Masséna struck the extreme right of the Austrian line during midmorning and quickly seized the main bridge across the Thaya south of Znaim, then pushed into two small villages before advancing directly on the town. Charles answered with two grenadier brigades, which moved forward during a thunderstorm and initially threw the French back.

• 4. Ceasefire and Armistice

  ›

  Archduke Charles had already approached Napoleon about a ceasefire before the battle reached its worst hours, proposing one as he left to begin peace negotiations. Marmont refused to observe it. The fighting dragged on through two days, with both sides taking similar casualties and neither gaining a decisive advantage. At approximately 7:00 in the evening of the 11th, French and Austrian staff officers rode together along the opposing lines announcing a cease-fire. The guns stopped. On the 12th of July, 1809, the two sides signed a formal armistice. The Battle of Znaim had ended not with a victor but with an agreement. The treaty of peace followed at Schönbrunn Palace on the 14th of October, 1809, closing the War of the Fifth Coalition entirely. Znaim was the last action of that war.