On 3 December 1800 the French army of General Jean Victor Moreau destroyed the Austrian and Bavarian army of Archduke John at Hohenlinden, east of Munich. The Austrians pushed through a snowbound forest believing the French were in retreat, ran into Moreau's line and were struck in the flank by the division of General Antoine Richepanse. Three weeks later Austria asked for an armistice.
War resumes in Bavaria
After Bonaparte's victory at Marengo in June 1800 an armistice halted the fighting in Germany, and Moreau, who had already taken Munich, spent months waiting while it was renewed. When talks failed and the war resumed late in the year, Archduke John went over to the attack, aiming at Munich.1
The ground east of the city was a broad plateau of forest around the village of Hohenlinden, about 34 kilometers from Munich. Moreau placed his troops on the wooded plateau astride the road that ran east through Hohenlinden toward Haag and Vienna. The Austrians, sure that they were chasing a beaten enemy, sent their columns into the forest; the main column took the only paved road through it. Napoleon & Empire describes the conditions as terrible, with broken roads, muddy tracks and snowstorms.2
The trap in the forest
As the Austrian columns came out of the trees they met the French line, and their frontal attack failed. According to the historian James K. Kieswetter, writing for EBSCO, John believed he was winning and threw the bulk of his troops into the center, where the divisions of Michel Ney and Emmanuel Grouchy held them, with French soldiers hidden in the woods and bushes and even firing from the treetops.3
Meanwhile Richepanse's division had marched around through the forest onto the Austrian flank and rear. Kieswetter calls his attack improvised and credits it with shattering the two Austrian columns on the left. Napoleon & Empire's biography of Moreau also gives Richepanse a share of the credit for the victory. Caught between two fires, the Austrians were driven back into the forest and broke up.4
Disputed numbers
The figures vary widely. Napoleon & Empire counts 53,795 French against 60,261 Austrians and Bavarians on the field. Kieswetter gives 100,000 French against 111,000 Austrians, the strength of the two armies as a whole, and puts the losses at about 18,000 Austrian against about 5,000 French, which he notes was the lowest proportion of French losses in any major battle of the era.5
To the gates of Vienna
There was no longer an Austrian army of any size between Moreau and Vienna. He pursued for three weeks, covering some 300 kilometers, and stopped only near the Austrian capital. Austria signed an armistice at Steyr on 25 December 1800, and on 9 February 1801 the Treaty of Lunéville ended the War of the Second Coalition, recognizing French control of the left bank of the Rhine.6
Moreau did not enjoy his fame for long. Napoleon & Empire relates that in 1804 he was tried over the royalist conspiracy of Pichegru and Cadoudal, sent into exile in the United States, and returned to Europe in 1813 to join Tsar Alexander I against Napoleon; he was mortally wounded near Dresden that August and died in September.7
