What happened at the Battle of Fleurus in 1794?
On 26 June 1794 the Prince of Saxe-Coburg attacked the French Army of the Sambre and Meuse under Jean-Baptiste Jourdan north of Charleroi, hoping to relieve the town. Charleroi had surrendered to the French a few hours earlier. Five Austrian and Dutch columns drove in both French wings, but Lefebvre held Lambusart in the centre and Jourdan threw in his reserve. In the evening Coburg broke off the battle and withdrew. A French observation balloon, L'Entreprenant, watched the fighting from above, and within weeks the Austrians gave up Belgium.5
Encyclopædia Universalis calls Fleurus the most significant battle of the War of the First Coalition. It is not the only battle of that name: the town also gave its name to the Battle of Fleurus of 1622 in the Thirty Years' War, and its fields saw the fighting at Ligny in 1815. The wider war is told in our guide to the French Revolutionary Wars, and the rest of the day in 26 June in military history.6
The Sambre, crossed five times
In the spring of 1794 the armies of the French Republic were trying to break into the Austrian Netherlands from the south. The right wing of the Army of the North and the Army of the Ardennes kept crossing the Sambre to besiege Charleroi, and kept being thrown back. Jomini, the Swiss staff officer who wrote the first critical history of these campaigns, counts the crossing of 18 June as the fifth.7
The Austrian commander-in-chief, Prince Josias of Saxe-Coburg, held a long line from the sea to the Meuse. His left on the Sambre was first under the Prince of Kaunitz and, from 30 May, under the Hereditary Prince of Orange, while his centre and right faced the Army of the North under Pichegru in Flanders. Jomini also recalls that the same fields had seen the victory of Marshal Luxembourg in 1690, and criticises Coburg for moving his central masses back and forth between the Lys and the Sambre and arriving everywhere too late.8
An army made from three
The decisive reinforcement came from the east. General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan marched from the Moselle with four divisions, crossed the Meuse at Dinant and by 2 June was in touch with the forces before Charleroi. On 8 June the Committee of Public Safety put the whole force under his command, and on 13 June it was named the Army of the Sambre and Meuse. Phipps puts its strength at about 90,000 to 96,000.9
Its generals would become famous. Kléber led the left, Marceau the right with the two divisions of the Ardennes, and Lefebvre, Championnet, Morlot and Hatry the centre and the siege. Phipps notes that Colonel Bernadotte, Colonel Soult, Lieutenant Colonel Mortier and Captain Ney all served in it, four future marshals of Napoleon.10
The first attempt failed. On 16 June the Prince of Orange attacked in thick fog, the troops of the Ardennes were driven over the Sambre, Lefebvre's division ran short of ammunition, and Jourdan ordered a retreat across the river. Phipps gives the French loss as 3,000 men and 8 guns against 2,796 Allied, and Jomini as 3,000 French against 2,200 Allied. On 18 June Jourdan crossed again and reopened the siege.11
Saint-Just and the threat of the guillotine
With the army went representatives on mission of the National Convention, among them Louis Antoine de Saint-Just. Jomini writes that the commissioners, Saint-Just above all, demanded the heads of the officers blamed for the retreat of 16 June, and that Jourdan calmed them only by promising to avenge it with a victory.12
Phipps adds that Jourdan knew that a defeat, or even failure to win, could cost him his life, and that his name, with those of Lefebvre and Soult, was on Saint-Just's list for accusation. Jourdan nevertheless refused an order to send part of his army away to Pichegru unless it was given to him in writing. Jomini, who also tells the story, puts the force Saint-Just wanted to send towards Lille at 30,000 men and credits Jourdan with the courage to oppose it.13
The balloon L'Entreprenant
The army had an unusual new weapon. A law of 2 April 1794 created a company of aérostiers under Captain Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle, with Lieutenant Lhomond, a sergeant major, a sergeant, two corporals and twenty soldiers. The Musée du Génie in Angers notes that Carnot imposed the balloon on Jourdan, who would have preferred more infantry.14
The balloon L'Entreprenant, filled with hydrogen and about 9 metres across, made its first observations at Maubeuge on 2 June 1794. From there the aérostiers walked it, still inflated, to Charleroi. The U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission writes that it took a crew of 24 men holding ropes to drag it across the country, and the Musée du Génie that the march covered about fifty kilometres, from 22 June.15
Charleroi surrenders
The siege of Charleroi ended just in time. Jomini and Phipps both tell how the commandant sent out a letter with his terms and Saint-Just sent the messenger back without opening it, saying that it was the place he wanted, not a scrap of paper. The garrison of about 2,800 men surrendered at discretion but was allowed the honours of war, and the officers kept their swords. Jomini has the garrison marching out on the evening of 25 June, and Encyclopædia Universalis also dates the capture to 25 June, while Phipps places the summons on the 26th. Alison also has the town capitulating on the evening of the 25th.16
The surrender came only hours before the relief. Jomini writes that the garrison had hardly marched out when the sound of guns announced the arrival of a relief that had come too late. Louis Figuier, the nineteenth-century historian of science, records that an Austrian officer taken in Charleroi said that if he had heard that signal a few hours earlier, the French would not be in the town. Alison, the Scottish historian of the period, tells the same story of the guns heard as the garrison left the gates.17
Coburg's five columns
Coburg had left Tournai on 20 June with the Austrian troops of his centre, leaving the Duke of York on the Scheldt, and joined his left wing near Nivelles. Jomini blames him for hesitating until the 26th although he knew that Charleroi was at its last gasp. Encyclopædia Universalis puts his force at 52,000 Austrians and Dutch. The French held a great entrenched semicircle around the town, with Kléber on the left, Morlot, Championnet and Lefebvre in the centre and Marceau on the right by the Sambre, and a large redoubt near Heppignies. Alison, who gives Coburg 75,000 men after he joined his left wing, puts the French at 89,000.18
The Allies advanced at or before daybreak in five columns: the Prince of Orange on the right, then the columns of Quasdanowich, Kaunitz and Archduke Charles, and Beaulieu on the left, with Alvinczi as chief of staff. Jomini counts five corps divided into nine columns on an outer semicircle about ten leagues long and compares the plan to the Allied attack at Leipzig in 1813, which succeeded only because the columns there were strong enough to support one another. Jourdan, by contrast, kept Hatry's division in reserve at Ransart once Charleroi had fallen. Alison makes the same comparison with Leipzig.19
On the French left the Prince of Orange drove Montaigu's division back over the Sambre at Marchienne, and an Allied party even came up to Charleroi, where, Soult writes, it was greeted with cannon fire because it did not know the town had surrendered. Kléber held the line of the Piéton and, Jomini writes, about two in the afternoon turned the Austrian left with Duhesme's brigade, with Bernadotte pushing into the wood of Monceaux. By four in the afternoon, Alison writes, the Allies had given up all the ground they had won in that quarter.20
Marceau's flight and Soult's warning
The real danger was on the right. Before six in the morning, by Soult's account, Beaulieu had driven the two divisions of the Ardennes across the Sambre at Tamines in complete disorder, leaving Marceau almost alone with his officers. Lefebvre sent his chief of staff, Colonel Soult, to see what was happening there.21
Soult found Marceau between the wood of Lépinoy and the hamlet of Baulet, about to be surrounded and seeking death to wipe out his troops' disgrace. In his memoirs Soult records that he told Marceau to go and find his soldiers and come back to win with them, while Lefebvre's men held his position to the right of Lambusart. Two hours later, Soult writes, Marceau returned with the bravest of them. Jomini describes Marceau taking command of a handful of battalions in the hedges and gardens of Lambusart while the rest of his corps recrossed the Sambre in horrible confusion.22
Lefebvre at Lambusart
The battle now turned on Lefebvre's division at Lambusart and the redoubts of Campinaire. Soult placed three battalions, the 11th Dragoons and twelve guns saved from Marceau's wreck at right angles to the line to fill the gap down to the Sambre. Soult describes how Lefebvre's men let the columns of Archduke Charles come within close range, fired a general volley and sent the light cavalry of d'Hautpoul out through a gap in the entrenchments, repulsing them three times in the morning.23
The ripe corn caught fire, the camp burned and ammunition wagons exploded, but the rallying cry of the advanced guard, Soult writes, was no retreat today. To their left, Championnet received a false report that Lefebvre had retreated and began to abandon the great redoubt at Heppignies. Jomini credits Jourdan's eye for the moment: he arrived with six battalions and six squadrons, sent Championnet back to the charge and launched Dubois's cavalry, which broke the first Austrian line and overran more than fifty guns before the Prince of Lambesc's cuirassiers recovered them, about seven in the evening.24
In the evening Lefebvre, at the head of the 80th regiment, retook Lambusart, supported by Hatry's men and the troops Marceau had rallied. Soult later wrote of fifteen hours of the most desperate fighting he had ever seen.25
Coburg breaks off
Coburg did not fight on. Phipps writes that he was alarmed by the losses of the columns on his right, which fought under his own eye, and that the news of Charleroi's fall weighed on him, while Archduke Charles thought that no decision had been reached. Alison writes that Coburg, hearing of the fall of Charleroi and bound by secret instructions to risk as little as possible before leaving Flanders, ordered a retreat at all points when success was within his grasp, and calls the battle in fact a drawn engagement. Fortescue, the historian of the British Army, writes that the battle was broken off before either side had gained a decisive advantage and leaves open whether Coburg acted from his own judgment or from the policy of the Austrian minister Thugut.26
The Allies fell back in good order. Fortescue places them on 27 June on a line from Soignies through Braine-l'Alleud to Gembloux, and Jomini notes that Coburg had already ordered the retreat when the last cavalry fighting took place. Harry Calvert, adjutant general of the Duke of York, wrote in his journal on 27 June that news had arrived of Coburg's failed attack and of the army falling back to Nivelles, Charleroi having surrendered. Alison adds that Coburg soon took post at Mont-Saint-Jean and Waterloo, at the edge of the forest of Soignies.27
Counting the losses
The numbers differ. Phipps, following the French staff historian Dupuis, gives Coburg's loss as 2,286 men, a mortar and a standard, not counting the garrison of Charleroi, and the French loss as about the same. Alison puts the loss on each side at between 4,000 and 5,000 men, and Encyclopædia Universalis says that the Allied losses were about half those of the French.28
The strengths are just as uncertain. Phipps gives 75,000 French against 52,000 Allies, Universalis 73,000 against 52,000, and Alison 89,000 against 75,000. Jourdan himself told the Committee that he had had only 50,000 men, perhaps, Phipps suggests, because he left out Marceau's runaways.29
What the balloon did
L'Entreprenant went up from the plateau of the mill of Jumet near Jourdan's headquarters. Coutelle observed from the basket with General Morlot, and messages went down to the ground by signal flags or in bags slid down the cable. The Centennial of Flight Commission writes that the two stayed aloft for the whole ten-hour engagement, while Figuier writes that it stayed up for eight hours.30
How much it mattered is disputed. The Centennial of Flight Commission calls Fleurus the first battle in which aerial reconnaissance contributed significantly to victory, and the National Air and Space Museum describes the balloon as the first military use of an aircraft with a critical impact on a battle. Coutelle himself was more modest. The Musée du Génie quotes him as saying that the balloon certainly did not win the battle, but that it greatly hindered the Austrians, who believed they could not take a step unseen, and gave the French troops confidence. Jomini, writing in 1820, went further the other way: he had it on good authority, he wrote in a footnote, that the balloons were of no use at all.31
The balloon quickly entered popular memory. The Science Museum in London holds a French ivory snuff box of 1794 to 1800 with a painted lid showing the balloon at the battle of Fleurus. After the battle the company received a second balloon, and a second company of aérostiers was formed.32
The road to Brussels
The consequences were greater than the battle. Encyclopædia Universalis notes that within a month the Austrians gave up the southern Netherlands, which France then annexed. Fortescue writes that the failure at Fleurus led the Emperor to decide to evacuate the Low Countries, and that the Austrian army was so demoralised that it might not have stood if Coburg had tried to make a stand.33
The French entered Brussels on 10 July 1794. Phipps observes that even Carnot and the Committee did not grasp the full importance of the battle until the enemy's retreat had shown it, and judges it, calmly considered, no brilliant feat of arms: Jourdan had only just held an entrenched position. Phipps notes that Jourdan in 1794 and Napoleon in 1815 are said to have used the same windmill for reconnaissance, and that in 1815 Soult and Ney, who had fought at Fleurus as a colonel and a captain, returned to the field as marshals of the Empire. Jomini, for his part, wrote that a faction had exaggerated the trophies of the day, but that Fleurus opened the brilliant series of French successes.34
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