Napoleon won his masterpiece at Austerlitz on 2 December 18051, luring the combined Austrian and Russian armies into attacking an apparently weak French position, then splitting them in two. Fought on the first anniversary of his coronation, it is the battle1 most often called his greatest.
Some generals win by strength. At Austerlitz, Napoleon won by making his enemy believe he was weak. Fought on the first anniversary of his coronation, against the combined armies of two emperors, it is the battle most often called his masterpiece.
The battle from both sides
Two perspectivesAusterlitz was Napoleon's masterpiece. Outnumbered by the combined Austro-Russian army, he deliberately weakened his right and abandoned the commanding Pratzen Heights, baiting the allies into pouring south to turn his flank. As they emptied the centre, Soult's corps stormed the heights and split the allied army in two. The southern wing was driven onto frozen ponds and broken. The victory smashed the Third Coalition, forced Austria to terms and led within months to the end of the thousand-year Holy Roman Empire. It stands as the model of a battle won by luring the enemy into a trap of his own making.
The allied army, with the Austrian and Russian emperors present, believed it had caught Napoleon overextended and weak on his right. It launched its main weight southward to cut him from Vienna, exactly as he intended, stripping troops from the central Pratzen Heights. When the French stormed that high ground and cut the army in two, the plan collapsed. The southern wing was pinned and shattered, some men dying on breaking ice. The defeat ended the Third Coalition, humiliated two empires and confirmed Napoleon as the master of Europe; it was a lesson in the danger of doing exactly what a great opponent wants.
The Battle of the Three Emperors
By late 1805 Napoleon faced a2 Third Coalition. In Moravia, the armies of Tsar Alexander I of Russia and Emperor Francis II of Austria gathered against him, outnumbering the French.1 Napoleon wanted them to attack before more allies arrived, so he set about tempting them into it.
The bait
He gave up the commanding Pratzen Heights in the centre without a fight and deliberately left his right flank looking thin and vulnerable1. To the watching Allied generals it looked like a French army in trouble, ripe to be cut off from Vienna. They took the bait.
The trap springs
At dawn on 2 December the Allies poured down off the Pratzen Heights to crush the French right. As their army slid south and the centre emptied, Napoleon launched Marshal Soult straight up the fog-covered slopes they had abandoned.1 The French seized the heights and drove a wedge through the middle3 of the Allied army, splitting it in two.
The rout
With their centre gone, the Allied wings were surrounded and shattered. Thousands of retreating soldiers streamed across frozen ponds to the south as French guns fired on the ice behind them, an image that became legend even if the drownings were fewer than the stories claimed1. By afternoon the coalition army had come apart.
The peace
Austerlitz was total. Austria sued for peace within days, signing the4 Treaty of Pressburg; the Third Coalition collapsed, and within a year the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire was formally dissolved1. Napoleon stood, for the moment, as master of continental Europe.
The masterpiece
What makes Austerlitz endure is not the scale but the design: an enemy tempted into attacking exactly where Napoleon wanted, then destroyed by a single decisive blow at the point they had weakened themselves. It is still studied as the model of a battle won in the mind before it was won on the field.