Who won the Battle of Marengo?
France won. On 14 June 1800, near Alessandria in Piedmont, the Austrian army of Michael von Melas attacked Napoleon Bonaparte's scattered Army of Reserve and pushed it back for most of the day. In the evening Desaix's fresh division and Kellermann's cavalry broke the Austrian pursuit, and the next day Melas agreed to withdraw behind the Mincio.1
At three in the afternoon of 14 June 1800 the battle on the plain of Marengo looked lost. Bonaparte's army had been driven back across the fields east of Alessandria, and the aged Austrian commander, General Michael von Melas, rode back into the town to announce his victory. By nightfall his army was streaming back over the Bormida river, his chief of staff was a prisoner, and the French general who had turned the battle, Louis Desaix, lay dead on the field.2
This guide follows the battle from both sides: the Austrian plan to break out of the trap Bonaparte had set behind them, the long French retreat, the arrival of Desaix, the cavalry charge of the younger Kellermann, the uncertain casualty figures, and the way the official story was rewritten afterward. It belongs to our guide to the French Revolutionary Wars. See also our life of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Why was the Battle of Marengo fought?
In 1800 France was at war with the Second Coalition, and in Italy the Austrians had the upper hand. Melas's army had shut up General André Masséna in Genoa and was pushing west along the Riviera toward the French frontier. Bonaparte, now First Consul, chose not to march straight to Genoa. Instead he gathered a new Army of Reserve around Dijon and led it over the Alps into the rear of the Austrians.3
The army crossed the Great St Bernard Pass, more than 8,000 feet up, between 15 and 20 May, dragging its guns over a bridle path, and slipped past the Austrian fort of Bard in the Aosta valley. Bonaparte did not go to the relief of Genoa. He turned east, entered Milan on 2 June and placed himself across Melas's communications with Austria, hoping to force the Austrians to fight with their backs to the wrong side.4
Genoa capitulated on 4 June, too late for the French, but the Austrians were now cut off. On 9 June General Jean Lannes's advance guard beat the Austrian corps of General Peter Ott at Montebello, and Bonaparte stood across Melas's line of retreat to the east. Melas, concentrated around the fortress of Alessandria, decided to break out by attacking. His council of war agreed that the honorable way out was a decisive battle on the plain of Marengo, where his superior cavalry and artillery could tell.5
How big were the armies at Marengo?
Melas brought about 31,000 men onto the field. George Furse, following the Austrian military review, gives 30,837, of whom 7,543 were cavalry, while Melas himself reported 27,000 infantry and 8,000 horse around Alessandria. Bonaparte had about 28,000 men within reach, with about 40 guns, and was far weaker than the Austrians in both cavalry and artillery.6
The French were also scattered, by their commander's own choice. Unable to find Melas and afraid that he would slip away north across the Po or south toward Genoa, Bonaparte sent General Louis Desaix with Boudet's division south toward Novi and Lapoype's division north across the Po. On the evening of 13 June he had no thought of a battle the next day.7
Desaix had only recently returned from Egypt and reached the army on 11 June, three days before the battle. Bonaparte's secretary Bourrienne called him the man Bonaparte loved and esteemed most, and the historian Thierry Lentz notes that the regime could later exalt him without fear of raising a rival to the First Consul. On the Austrian side the battle was planned by the quartermaster general, Anton von Zach. The Austrian historian Oscar Criste, writing in the national biography, judged Zach's arrangements for the battle entirely sound and held that the defeat could not be laid at his door.8
How did the Austrian attack begin?
On the morning of 14 June the Austrians crossed the Bormida by two bridges covered by a single bridgehead east of Alessandria. Furse found that the bridgehead had only one exit onto the plain, which slowed the deployment for hours. O'Reilly's column crossed first and drove in the French outposts, followed by the divisions of Haddick and Kaim on the high road through Marengo, while Ott's column turned north toward Castel Ceriolo. The battle opened between eight and nine o'clock. Melas later reported that the attack, set for daybreak, had been put off for several hours because the French had pushed his outposts back to the bridgehead the evening before.9
In front of Marengo the French corps of General Claude Victor held the Fontanone, a muddy brook. Gardanne's division was pushed back behind it, and Victor's troops, helped by Kellermann's cavalry and then by Lannes's corps on their right, held the brook long enough to force the Austrians to deploy their whole army. Bonaparte, some distance from the field, did not understand until about eleven that he faced Melas's main army. He then sent riders to recall Desaix and Lapoype.10
How close did Napoleon come to losing at Marengo?
Very close. Victor's corps was driven back into Marengo village, held it for a time and then broke, retreating in disorder toward San Giuliano, which left Lannes outflanked by Ott's column on his right. Bonaparte brought up his last troops, the Consular Guard, Monnier's division and two cavalry regiments, about 7,000 men in Sargent's count, and sent a column against Castel Ceriolo. The grenadiers of the Consular Guard stood in the open plain against cavalry and artillery. The bulletin compared them to a granite redoubt.11
By the middle of the afternoon the French had fallen back on San Giuliano, slowly followed. Melas, who had been lightly wounded and had lost two horses under him, was sure of victory. About two o'clock, Jomini writes, he left Zach and Kaim to gather its fruits and rode back to Alessandria to send the news to Genoa, Turin and the Aulic Council in Vienna. His Austrian biographer of 1885, otherwise full of praise for him, called it regrettable that he left the field before the fighting was over and so lost the battle. Jomini adds that the pursuit was slow: much of the Austrian cavalry had been detached or badly mauled, many troopers were scattered over the plain rounding up prisoners, and the moment to commit the last fresh cavalry brigade was lost.12
What did Desaix do at Marengo?
Desaix had set out before dawn with Boudet's division toward Novi. How he came back is disputed. His aide Savary wrote that at daybreak Desaix heard the cannonade behind him, halted his division and sent Savary to make sure Novi was clear, and that on his way to Bonaparte Savary met the officer Bruyère carrying the recall order. Furse argues that Desaix did not march to the sound of the guns and turned back only on receiving the order, with Boudet leaving his position about 1 p.m. Either way the division reached San Giuliano about four or five in the afternoon, as Zach was forming his column for the pursuit.13
Bonaparte held a council on horseback. Marmont, the young commander of the artillery, was there and recorded what Desaix said: that a fresh charge would fail unless a sharp artillery fire first shook the enemy, adding that this was how battles are lost. Marmont scraped together 18 guns, five survivors of the morning, five more just arrived from the Scrivia and the eight of Boudet's division, and opened fire on the head of the Austrian column for about twenty minutes.14
How did the French counterattack win the battle?
Late in the afternoon Boudet's division advanced against the head of Zach's column along the high road. Desaix, riding behind the 9th Light, was struck at the very first shots. Savary wrote that a ball went through his heart. The Austrian grenadiers held, and the French line began to waver: Marmont, whose words Herrmann cites, saw the 30th demi-brigade in flight and an Austrian column in good order coming out of the smoke fifty paces away.15
Marmont fired canister into it at close range. Immediately afterward General François-Étienne Kellermann rode past the guns with the remnant of his heavy cavalry brigade, about 400 sabers in Britannica's account (Savary, who carried him Bonaparte's order to charge, says about 600), and struck the left flank of the column, which broke apart. Zach himself was taken prisoner. Kellermann then rallied his troopers and, with the cavalry of the Consular Guard, routed the Austrian cavalry that should have protected the column.16
How many men Zach lost in those minutes depends on who counted: about 1,800 in Jomini, 3,000 grenadiers sabered or captured in Marmont's memoirs, and 6,000 in Bonaparte's bulletin. Panic spread back through the Austrian army. Lannes advanced again against Ott's and Kaim's troops, and by nightfall the survivors were back across the Bormida.17
How many died at the Battle of Marengo?
Herrmann ranked Marengo among the bloodiest battles of the modern age for the numbers engaged, but the totals depend heavily on who is counting. The official Austrian returns, which Alfred Herrmann found in the Vienna war archive, list 963 killed, 5,518 wounded and 2,921 prisoners: 9,402 men. Britannica gives about 7,500 killed and wounded and some 4,000 captured, and Jomini nearly 7,000 killed and wounded and 3,000 prisoners. The official account that Berthier published in 1805 raised the Austrian loss to 19,500: 4,500 dead, 8,000 wounded and 7,000 prisoners.18
French losses were played down from the start. The bulletin admitted 600 killed, 1,500 wounded and 900 prisoners. Don Barry of the Fondation Napoléon puts them at more than 5,000, a quarter of the French soldiers engaged, Jomini at 7,000 killed and wounded and more than 1,000 prisoners, and Herrmann, adding up the reports of the French divisional commanders, at no fewer than 8,000. Writing to the Austrian emperor from the battlefield, Bonaparte himself spoke of 15,000 corpses on the plain.19
What happened after the Battle of Marengo?
At first light on 15 June Count Neipperg came out to the French outposts, and General Skal was sent to Bonaparte to ask for an armistice. Melas's council of war chose to give up the fight in Italy. In his report to Vienna of 17 June Melas wrote that his army had lost, at seven in the evening, a victory it had never better deserved or more dearly bought, and that he called the council because a new battle against a stronger enemy, with an army exhausted and short of food, would probably be lost. By the Convention of Alessandria, agreed that day between Berthier and Melas, the Austrian army was allowed to march out with its arms, guns and baggage and to withdraw behind the Mincio, handing over to the French the fortresses of Piedmont, Liguria and much of Lombardy, among them Alessandria, Tortona, Turin and Genoa.20
Treccani's account notes that Bonaparte granted these mild terms because his own position was far from secure, with news from Paris about the stability of his regime that was not good. He was back in Paris on 2 July.21
Who won the Battle of Marengo, and why?
The French won, but narrowly and late. They nearly lost because Bonaparte had divided his army in search of an enemy he believed was escaping, and because the Austrians, though they attacked with superior numbers, cavalry and guns, were slow to deploy and slow to pursue. They won because three things came together in a few minutes of the evening: Desaix's fresh division, Marmont's battery and Kellermann's charge. Marmont wrote that fortune never intervened more decisively. Savary put it more simply: lost until midday, the battle was completely won by six.22
The credit was fought over for decades. Kellermann insisted that he had charged on his own initiative, at a moment when the French infantry was giving way, and Herrmann found that Marmont and other eyewitnesses, among them the Austrian officer Stutterheim, bear him out, at least in part. Marmont called it absurd and unjust to deny Kellermann the glory of that moment, yet the official reports gave him little of it.23
Was the story of Marengo rewritten?
Yes. The bulletin of 15 June gave Desaix a noble last message for the First Consul, regretting that he had not done enough to live in posterity. Bourrienne, who took down the bulletin at Bonaparte's dictation, later called those words imaginary, and Marmont wrote flatly that Desaix said no such thing: he took a ball in the heart and fell dead without a word.24
The account of the battle itself changed too. Marmont, who thought the first bulletin broadly true, recorded that Napoleon had the war ministry's fuller version struck out and dictated a new one, of which hardly half was true, and later a third in which all the facts were false. Bourrienne, too, wrote that Bonaparte had the account of the battle begun again three times and that none of the versions told the truth. The official Relation that Berthier presented to the emperor on the battlefield in 1805 gave all the glory to Napoleon and disposed of Kellermann's charge in one paragraph. The historian Thierry Lentz has shown how the regime made Desaix an ideal hero, the friend who gave his life to save the Consulate, until he seemed the sole author of the victory.25
One relic of the legend survives in London. Napoleon's grey horse Marengo, which the National Army Museum says was named after the victory, was brought to England after Waterloo, and its skeleton has been on display at the museum since the 1960s.26
Why was the Battle of Marengo important?
Marengo decided the war in Italy. The Austrians gave up northern Italy west of the Mincio, and after a second defeat, at Hohenlinden, Austria made peace at Lunéville in February 1801. Britain, left without allies on the continent, followed at Amiens in 1802. Broucek, Melas's German biographer, writes that the defeat at Marengo, together with the disaster of Hohenlinden, decided the war of the Second Coalition in France's favor.27
Its political weight was greater still. The victory let the First Consul consolidate his power in Paris, and the Treccani encyclopedia describes it as laying the ground for the Empire. Don Barry sums it up: rarely in history has such an indecisive victory contributed so much to very decisive results.28
Where was the Battle of Marengo fought?
On the plain of Marengo in Piedmont, northern Italy, just east of Alessandria, between the Bormida and the Scrivia rivers. The village of Marengo, which gave the battle its name, is today part of Spinetta Marengo, a district of the city of Alessandria. The ground is generally flat farmland, broken only by a few low rises near San Giuliano.29
Marengo sits among Bonaparte's Italian victories alongside Austerlitz and Wagram in our ranking of the greatest Napoleonic battles, and its Alpine crossing is compared with Hannibal's in Hannibal vs Napoleon.
