What happened at the Battle of Hohenlinden in 1800?
On 3 December 1800 the French Army of the Rhine under General Jean Victor Moreau destroyed the Austrian and Bavarian army of Archduke John in the snowbound forest of Hohenlinden, east of Munich. The Austrians, who believed the French were retreating, marched through the forest in separate columns. Their main column was stopped in front of Hohenlinden while Antoine Richepanse's division fell on its rear, and the army broke up. Thousands of Austrians were taken prisoner, Austria signed an armistice at Steyr on 25 December, and the Peace of Lunéville in February 1801 ended the War of the Second Coalition.5
Bonaparte's victory at Marengo in June 1800 is the battle everyone remembers from that year. Yet it was Moreau's victory at Hohenlinden, six months later and far to the north in Bavaria, that brought the French within reach of Vienna and made Austria sign the peace. Many historians since have ranked it among the most brilliant victories of French arms, and for years Moreau's name was set against Bonaparte's. The wider war is told in our guide to the French Revolutionary Wars.6
Marengo did not end the war
In the spring of 1800 Moreau, at the head of the Army of the Rhine, beat the Austrian general Paul Kray in a series of battles in southern Germany, among them Engen, Messkirch, Biberach and Höchstädt, and drove him into the entrenched camp of Ulm and then back toward the Inn.7
In July the fighting in Germany stopped under the armistice of Parsdorf, a month after a similar truce had followed Marengo in Italy. For four months Austria and France talked about peace without result. Austria still had strong armies in the field, and Bonaparte, to force a settlement, ordered his generals to resume the war.8
Austria fought the campaign of 1800 without its best general. Archduke Charles had urged the government to come to terms with France, and for that he was removed from command before the campaign opened, a dismissal thinly disguised as an appointment to govern Bohemia. Kray took his place.9
After the armistice Vienna changed its commander again. Kray was dismissed, and the army in Bavaria went to Archduke John, the emperor's brother, who was only 18. The appointment was in name only: the emperor tied the archduke to General Franz von Lauer, who directed the operations, and the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie records that John had strict orders never to refuse his signature to Lauer's dispositions.10
A young archduke takes the offensive
The Austrian army stood behind the Inn, a fast Alpine river with steep banks and fortified crossings. Instead of waiting there, the Austrians decided to cross the river and march round the French left flank toward Munich. Hostilities resumed at the end of November, in heavy rain, on roads that soon turned to mud, and the outflanking march quickly fell behind its timetable.11
On 1 December the Austrians fell on the French left wing of General Paul Grenier at Ampfing and drove it back. The success made the archduke and his staff overconfident. Furse writes that they believed they had beaten the whole French army, though only a few divisions had been engaged. Moreau withdrew through the forest to the open ground at Hohenlinden, while the Austrians rested on 2 December.12
The forest stretched for many miles between the Isar and the Inn, a dense pine wood that blocked cavalry and guns. Only two good roads crossed it from the east toward Munich: one by Hohenlinden from Mühldorf, the other by Ebersberg from Wasserburg. Elsewhere there were only woodcutters' tracks.13
Four columns in a snowbound forest
3 December, morning. The archduke sent his army through the forest in four columns, expecting no serious resistance before the open ground in front of Munich. The strongest column, with the archduke himself, most of the artillery and the baggage, took the paved highway from Mühldorf toward Hohenlinden. The others, under Kienmayer and Baillet Latour on the right and Riesch on the left, had to follow the forest tracks. All four were to meet in the open ground between Hohenlinden and Harthofen.14
The rain of the previous days had turned to snow, and it was falling heavily when the battle began. The columns on the tracks fell far behind, and only the main column on the highway reached the edge of the forest at Hohenlinden in time.15
Moreau had placed Grandjean's division, now commanded by General Emmanuel de Grouchy, and Michel Ney's division across the exit of the forest in front of Hohenlinden, with Grenier's other divisions to the north. His real blow was prepared to the south. At daybreak the divisions of Antoine Richepanse and Charles Decaen left the Ebersberg road to strike north across the forest at the rear of the Austrian column.16
The Austrian column attacked Grouchy as it came out of the trees. Hungarian grenadiers tried to turn his right through the wood and were thrown back after hard fighting among the pines, and a second attack failed as well. The Austrian center could not deploy out of the forest.17
Richepanse in the Austrian rear
Richepanse's march went wrong at the start. As his division labored along the snow-covered lanes, Riesch's Austrian column reached the village of St. Christoph and cut it in two. Richepanse did not stop to reunite his troops. He pressed on with two half-brigades and the 1st Chasseurs, counted on Decaen to free his second brigade, and reached the hamlet of Mattenpoet, at the eastern end of the defile on the highway.18
There he surprised dismounted Austrian cuirassiers and took many of them prisoner. Leaving General Walther with part of his force to hold off the Austrian cavalry, he turned with the rest into the defile, where the artillery and wagons of the Austrian column were jammed on the road. Battalions sent back to stop him were broken with the bayonet, and panic spread along the column.19
At Hohenlinden Moreau saw the Austrians waver and guessed that Richepanse was in their rear. He ordered Ney and Grouchy to charge. They drove the Austrians back into the defile from the west while Richepanse pressed in from the east, and the two French forces met in the middle of the road. Thousands of Austrians surrendered or fled into the woods, leaving guns and wagons behind. Walther was badly wounded holding Mattenpoet.20
The wings and the Polish legion
North of the highway the Austrian right, under Kienmayer and Baillet Latour, came out of the forest only when the battle in the center was already being decided. Grenier's divisions, though outnumbered, held their ground, then went over to the attack with the support of d'Hautpoul's cavalry and drove the Austrians back into the valleys from which they had come.21
In the south, Decaen's division fought Riesch's column, which was still trying to reach Hohenlinden. Decaen had with him the Polish legion of General Karol Kniaziewicz, raised on the Rhine for French service, the formation Polish historians call the Danube Legion (Legia Naddunajska). Decaen's troops freed Richepanse's cut-off brigade and drove Riesch back toward the Inn with many prisoners.22
The Poles had a hard share of that fight. Furse writes that Decaen marched them back to St. Christoph, where at first they bore the whole weight of the Austrian column until a French brigade under Durutte struck its flank. The Italian Enciclopedia Italiana (Treccani) says that the legion fought heroically at Hohenlinden, and the Polish Ministry of Education's teaching materials credit it with an important, even decisive, part in the victory. Kniaziewicz himself had earlier served in the Polish Legions in Italy under Jan Henryk Dąbrowski.23
Counting the cost
The figures for Hohenlinden differ widely from source to source. On the field, Thiers and Furse have fewer than 60,000 French against some 70,000 Austrians and Bavarians, Treccani 56,000 against 50,000, and the Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, the Bavarian state museum of history, 70,000 French against more than 60,000. Kieswetter's 100,000 against 111,000 match the strengths of the two whole armies, which Furse puts at 100,000 French and 120,000 Austrians.24
For the Austrian and Bavarian losses the estimates run from almost 12,000 imperial troops and 50 guns, plus 1,850 of the 5,000 Bavarians (Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte), to about 18,000 (Kieswetter) and nearly 20,000, of them 12,000 prisoners, with 87 guns (Thiers). Treccani gives 16,000, of them 11,000 prisoners. French losses are put at between 1,300 and 2,500 by the Bavarian museum, 2,500 by Treccani and about 5,000 by Kieswetter and the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie.25
Whatever the exact count, the sources agree that the defeat was crushing and that the French lost far fewer men. Treccani, Thiers and Furse all put most of the Austrian loss down to prisoners.26
From Steyr to Lunéville
There was no longer an Austrian army of any size between Moreau and Vienna. The French crossed the Inn, took Salzburg and drove on across the Salza, the Traun and the Enns, with Richepanse in the van winning a string of rearguard actions.27
Archduke John handed over the command to his brother, Archduke Charles, who was recalled too late to save the army and asked Moreau for a truce. On 25 December 1800 the armistice of Steyr was signed. Moreau's advance guard had crossed the Enns and stood not far from Vienna, but he chose peace over a march on the capital.28
On 9 February 1801 Austria signed the Peace of Lunéville. It confirmed the terms of Campo Formio, gave France the left bank of the Rhine and set the Austrian border in Italy on the Adige. The War of the Second Coalition on the continent was over.29
Whose victory was it?
Napoleon later belittled the battle. In private he treated it as a stroke of luck rather than a planned victory, and on St. Helena he claimed that Richepanse had marched without orders. Both Thiers and Furse reject the last claim: Moreau's written orders for the flank march were printed in the French war ministry's records, though both note that the orders were only general ones.30
The rivalry between the two generals soon turned into enmity. Moreau was arrested in 1804 with the royalist conspirators Cadoudal and Pichegru, sentenced to two years in prison and allowed to leave for the United States. He returned in 1813 to serve the allies against Napoleon and was mortally wounded at the Battle of Dresden.31
Richepanse did not long survive his victory either. Sent to Guadeloupe as commander of an expedition in 1802, he died there the same year. Archduke John, who had to answer in public for a defeat that his biographer in the Neue Deutsche Biographie blames on Lauer, went on to command again in 1809 and lived until 1859.32
