On 26 June 1794, in the War of the First Coalition, the Prince of Saxe-Coburg attacked General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan's French army around Fleurus, north of Charleroi, to relieve a fortress that, unknown to him, had surrendered the day before. His columns gained ground at first, but the French held and counterattacked, and by evening Coburg had broken off the battle. Within weeks the Austrians gave up Belgium. Above the field hung l'Entreprenant, a tethered hydrogen balloon carrying French observers, one of the first military uses of aircraft.
A general on probation
By the summer of 1794 the French Republic, in the middle of the Terror, had gone over to the offensive in the Austrian Netherlands, today's Belgium. Jourdan, who had been removed from command months earlier for opposing the Committee of Public Safety, was given a new army on the Sambre, and World History Encyclopedia notes that another failure could well have cost him his head. The young Jacobin Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, a member of the committee, accompanied the army and drove it on with threats and executions.1 › Battle of Tourcoing, 1794
After several attempts to cross the Sambre had failed, the French got over the river again on 18 June and laid siege to the fortress of Charleroi. Britannica dates the siege from 12 June, when the French first invested the fortress; Charleroi surrendered on 25 June. World History Encyclopedia, following the historian Ramsay Weston Phipps, has Saint-Just answer the garrison's offer of terms with the words "It is not the paper I want, but the place". That same afternoon Coburg's relief army arrived.2
Battle around Fleurus
Coburg, unaware that the fortress had fallen, attacked the next morning in five columns along a wide arc of French positions. Britannica gives Jourdan and General Jean-Baptiste Kléber 73,000 men against 52,000 Austrians and Dutch, and World History Encyclopedia 75,000 against 52,000. The coalition columns did well at first and inflicted heavy losses: on the French right the division of General François Marceau was driven back in disorder, and World History Encyclopedia describes the village of Lambusart burning as the troops fought through it.3
But the French line held. In World History Encyclopedia's account, General François Joseph Lefebvre's division beat off repeated attacks around Fleurus, Kléber's troops held the crossings on the left, and in the center the French retook the heights of Heppignies with the bayonet. In the afternoon Coburg learned that Charleroi had fallen and ordered a retreat; the French, exhausted and short of ammunition, did not pursue. The losses are uncertain: World History Encyclopedia puts them at about 5,000 on each side, besides the Charleroi garrison; Britannica says the coalition lost only half as many as the French; and Hérodote, a French history site, writes that Coburg left 5,000 dead and wounded on the field.4
An eye in the sky
Earlier in 1794 the Republic had formed the world's first air unit, the Compagnie d'aérostiers, led by the scientist Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle. At Fleurus its only balloon, l'Entreprenant, tethered by cables, rose over the battlefield with observers who sent reports down by signals or in bags and notes dropped from the basket. The US Centennial of Flight Commission says Coutelle and General Antoine Morlot stayed aloft through the whole ten-hour battle and credits the balloon with a real share in the victory; HistoryNet speaks of nine hours.5
Opinions differed even then. HistoryNet notes that reactions ranged from mild approval to scorn and that Jourdan did not mention the balloon in his memoirs, and World History Encyclopedia records that several French officers, Soult among them, later called it useless. HistoryNet adds that military ballooning nevertheless spread over the following century, to the American Civil War and beyond.6
Belgium won
Fleurus convinced the Austrians that the Netherlands could not be held. Britannica says they abandoned them within a month and the territory was annexed by France; World History Encyclopedia describes the French entering Antwerp and Liège in July and overrunning the Dutch Republic by January 1795. It also argues that the victory weakened the case for the Terror, which ended with the fall of Robespierre and Saint-Just in July 1794. Jourdan later became a marshal of the Empire, and it was he who stood beside King Joseph Bonaparte at Vitoria in 1813, told on our 21 June page. Britannica notes a memorial of 1936 at Fleurus to the three French victories won there, in 1690, 1794 and 1815.7
