by Tom Anderson
The war had entered quite a different phase…
Chapter 39: O Vienna
DREI HELDER; DREI RETTER; DREI MÄRTYRER.
- inscription on triple monument to Niklas Salm, Johann Sobieski and Wolfgang Mozart, Stephansplatz, Vienna[218]
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From: “The Jacobin Wars – the Italo-German Front” by Joshua H. Calhoun (University of New York Press, 1946)—
Some contemporary commentators attributed the stalling of the French advance into Germany (following the battle of Regensburg in October 1798) to the fact that Robespierre ordered the withdrawal of forces from the German front in order to repel the Anglo-Royal French Seigneur offensive in February 1799. The disparity in dates should immediately suggest the unlikelihood of this oft-repeated lazy assumption. While it is true that the French armies in Italy and Germany did not receive many reinforcements after February – all new troops being diverted to the Vendean front – this did not take effect until the start of Spring 1799.
It is more accurate to say that the French armies in Germany had simply reached their limits. Leroux’s Guerre d’éclair strategy had arguably been self-defeating by its very successes. The Jacobin forces had, like Britain’s Duke of Marlborough and Frederick II of Prussia before them, proved capable of moving faster into Germany than the Austrians had thought possible. Yet, though their ‘la maraude’ practices meant they could live off the land effectively without much of a supply train – at the expense of stirring up resentment among the locals against them – the French still needed a ready supply of powder, shot and cartridges to fight battles, and these could not be so easily stripped from occupied country. Ironically, the superiority of French Gribeauval artillery—coming mostly from ancien régime programmes originally, but the popular eye has always associated them with the Revolution—caused problems when les maraudeurs tried to use captured Austrian ammunition to restock their supplies. The new French cannon had been built to a slightly different calibre to their Austrian counterparts, with the result that the Austrian roundshot were too large. Leroux found himself being forced to order the drilling out of several cannon in order to use the captured shot, and such thinned weapons had a tendency to burst after prolongued use, killing their crews.
Also, while the conscripted French armies were larger than the forces the Austrians could bring to bear against them, they were of course greatly outnumbered by the increasingly resentful civilian population. There was a limit to how much territory the French could hold down with the number of men they had, especially when Leroux needed to retain a large enough fighting force to meaningfully continue the offensive. While Ney successfully built his authority in Swabia, creating the puppet state La République Germanique Souabe (the Swabian Germanic Republic), Leroux was plagued continuously by bandits attacking his supply train even before the instigation of the formal Kleinkrieg which gave its name to an entire genre of warfare in years to come. Leroux was placed in a difficult quandary: if he stripped more troops from his van to guard his rear, he lessened his chances of victory in any engagement, but if he did nothing, then his larger van might not get the supplies it needed to fight at all.
The spring of 1799 arguably marks the start of a breakdown between the various Republics, though this was of course not formalised until the Double Revolution. Ney refused to send more forces out of Swabia to guard Leroux’s supply lines, claiming that his dispersed troops were already hard-pressed in preventing a rising by Württemberger irregulars (almost certainly an exaggeration). Away to the south in Italy, Hoche reacted unfavourably upon hearing that Robespierre had diverted his precious reinforcements away to the Vendean front. This meant that Hoche’s Army of Italy could not try to force the Brenner Pass against Archduke Ferdinand’s rearguard, and it also meant that a pre-emptive expedition against the Hapsburg forces in Tuscany would be too much of an overstretch. Hoche was often impulsive enough to order offensives against the odds, but even he could recognise the realities of the situation. Without reinforcements, he only had sufficient forces to hold down the existing arc of territory he had conquered from Savoy to Venice. The Italian Latin Republic, which was largely synonymous with the person of Lazare Hoche, began to collectively realise that it was on its own. Only the Swiss Republic remained fully linked to Paris—or at least the French army holding it down and the effectively exiled Jean-Paul Marat were.
This background serves to explain why Leroux’s advance after the Sack of Regensburg began to stumble. The French took far longer to advance the two hundred and fifty miles from Regensburg to Vienna than they had in their lightning push over the similar distance from Haguenau to Regensburg. Despite Leroux’s difficulties, General Mozart – now in supreme command of Austria’s armies, marshal in all but name – held firm and refused to authorise an attack on the Jacobin army as it slowly ground closer to the capital. The separate Army of Bohemia pushed down from the north under Quosdanovich and gave battle at Linz, joined by local militia forces who feared the same fate as their neighbours to the east. Despite holding a strongly defensive position, the Austrians were decisively defeated by Leroux’s force, which was comparable in number. Mozart’s caution, previously derided as cowardice by many armchair generals, suddenly seemed like the only course distinct from suicide.
The young Archduke Francis, now King of the Romans and unelected claimant Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, supported Mozart wholeheartedly. Francis believed the general to be Austria’s best hope at weathering the French attack and surviving: undoubtedly the fact that this tense wait for the Jacobin hordes was his baptism of fire as monarch coloured his perceptions in later life and helps explain many of his odder views in subsequent years.
Francis’ support meant that many of Mozart’s more unusual proposals were pushed through in time to do some good. Despite the many conflicts in Germany during the eighteenth century, Vienna itself had not been threatened since the Ottoman siege of 1683, and the two situations, more than a century apart, were painfully similar in many respects. Vienna’s fortifications were once again by now outdated and the city sprawled comfortably beyond them, safe in the knowledge that it lay at the core of a vast and powerful Empire. The main city wall, the Linienwall, was almost a hundred years old and unsuited to face modern artillery.
But Vienna was now again faced by a war far more earnest and vicious than the usual territorial conflicts between the German states. In 1683 that had been a holy war between Catholic Christianity and Islam; in 1799 many Hapsburg loyalists saw it as one between Christianity and the French’s deistic-atheism. Others regarded it more conventionally as one between monarchism and republicanism, the latter term still being synonymous with the bloody reigns of terror that later generations would more specifically call Jacobinism. Either way, both political ideology and religion lent a sharper edge to the conflict. The horror stories coming out of Swabia and Bavaria reinforced the idea that this was all or nothing. If Mozart lost, if Vienna fell, the whole world as German-speakers knew it might fall with it, future generations reduced to nothing but hewers of wood and drawers of water for the ‘superior Latin race’. French propaganda drew parallels between the Romans’ attempts to conquer ‘barbarian’ Germany and their present attack: the Austrians retaliated with woodcuts comparing Mozart and Francis to Arminius, a Germanic chieftain who had defeated one such Roman attack in AD 9.
Now Mozart’s ruthless ideas took shape. Taking inspiration from 1683, he had all the houses built outside the Linienwall razed, providing a plain suitable for an artillery killing field. New temporary forts with modern Vauban-type star bastions were constructed around the Linienwall. The hastily-built nature of these meant that they would probably not be as durable as Mozart would like, but he believed the important thing was to delay the French, rather than attempt to defeat them. “A siege can break the most invincible army,” he wrote. “Not merely roundshot and canister from our walls, but also sickness and starvation; they hurt the besiegers as much as, if not more, than the besieged. And al
l of this saps their morale. A Turkish army outnumbering the defenders twenty to one failed to take this city by siege. The French are far fewer in number. Let us hope and pray that the same strategy will be successful”.
Francis, meanwhile, made several public speeches to rally the people of Vienna. Our stereotyped picture of him today makes it easy to forget that he was a skilled orator, more so than his father, and made the firm link in their minds between the Turkish sieges of 1529 and 1683 and the present invasion. “This is the third time the forces of barbarism have tried to topple civilisation,” he said. “This time, the barbarians come from the west rather than the east; but they shall be no more successful this time.”
Those confident words were not backed up by events, not until March 1799. Leroux’s army besieged the city starting from the third of that month, successfully repulsing attempts by Hungarian and Croatian cavalry to harry them as they dug in. Leroux was, like Boulanger, from a fairly humble background (the son of a cobbler) and though a gifted amateur at military affairs, he lacked much previous experience before this campaign. He therefore invested direct command of the operation in the experienced General Lucien Cougnon, an artilley officer who had previously been reognised as a master of siege warfare under the ancien régime. It bespoke of Cougnon’s value that he had managed to retain his position through the worst of Robespierre’s purges.
Cougnon’s approach was fairly straightforward; he sought to demolish five of Mozart’s new forts, opening a gap large enough to bring the whole army through without its flanks being enfiladed, and then to make a frontal assault on the outdated Linienwall. He was confident that the modern French artillery could make sufficient breaches in the wall that the Austrians would be unable to effectively defend them all. Leroux endorsed the plan and the French’s steam fardier-towed artillery began pounding Mozart’s forts from March 17th. The fragility of the hastily built fortifications swiftly proved itself, with two of the forts being battered down after only two days of bombardment. They were then taken by small forces of elite grenadiers without many losses on the French side. The mood in Vienna was ‘a gloom of inevitability’ in the words of the artist Ferdinand Bauer, who was living in the city at the time.[219] Just as the Revolutionaries had defeated every general sent to stop them since Wurmser withdrew from Nancy, now Mozart too could not stop them.
Vienna was arguably saved by a night attack led by Kováts Istvan[220] on the 21st. The Hungarian cavalry under Kováts were this time able to break through the complacent French sentries and raid the artillery positioned against the three other forts which Cougnon sought to destroy. The Hungarians wrought havoc before a counter-attack led personally by Leroux forced them to withdraw. Kováts had specifically equipped his men for sabotaging guns, and when the light of day dawned, Leroux found that – as well as a large number of his artillerymen being sabred down, some in their sleep – the vast majority of the guns had been spiked. Most of the damage was not irrepairable, as Kováts’ forces had had limited time and had wanted to remain stealthy, so could not try something more permanent and spectacular like forcing the guns to burst. Nonetheless it would take time to repair – and those trained artillerymen could not be so easily replaced. In one stroke, the Hapsburg forces had made their foe’s job significantly harder.
The two French artillery companies directed against the now-destroyed forts had survived, and Cougnon redirected them against the remaining forts, while Leroux ordered repair work to commence on the damaged guns. However, perhaps emboldened by the French setback, those three Austrian forts fought considerably harder and inflicted bloody casualties when they were stormed by Leroux’s grenadiers. The French lost several grenadier companies, significantly blunting what Cougnon had wanted to use as the vanguard for assaulting the breaches he planned to make in the Linienwall.
The last of the forts was finally secured on April 2nd. Leroux ordered his long-awaited advance and the remaining French guns began pounding the Linienwall on April 6th. Cougnon’s prediction about the wall’s ineffectiveness proved accurate, and several breaches were rapidly made. Mozart quickly made a decision. Just as Cougnon had thought, the breaches were too many to be defensible by the Hapsburg defenders. Mozart gave the order that he had long dreaded: the bulk of the armies focused in Vienna were to sortie forth and engage Leroux’s army on the killing field cleared of houses, hopefully keeping the French in place where the guns on the Linienwall could continue to inflict casualties on them. Only a skeleton force was left defending the breaches. It was a desperate gamble, and a sign that Hapsburg Austria had truly reached the end of its tether.
The Battle of Vienna was epic, a defining moment in the history of Europe. The Austrians outnumbered the French by a little more than three to two, but Mozart had still yet to find an effective defence against the Revolutionary tactics introduced by Boulanger. Leroux, taking over command again from Cougnon as the siege shifted to a field battle, hammered Mozart’s deep lines with his columns again and again. Meanwhile the steam-towed Cugnot artillery trundled left and right across the treacherously flat killing field, enfilading the Austrian lines as quickly as they redeployed. Twenty-pound roundshot continued to plunge from the walls and every shot killed dozens of Frenchmen in their compact columns, but many of the huge Austrian guns were unseated by return fire from Leroux’s own siege guns. If Kováts’ ploy had not succeeded, the French would have been even more successful, perhaps making a crucial difference. As it was, Leroux was forced to divide his remaining artillery between enfilading the Austrian troops and unseating the guns on the Linienwall, with the result that neither task received as much focused bombardment as he would have liked.
Still, it seems clear that Mozart would have been defeated, had it not been for the Miracle on the Danube. As the sixth of April drew closer to night, with Mozart’s forces close to breaking point, the people of Vienna heard the sound of a distant trumpet. Archduke Ferdinand and General Wurmser had returned from Italy, bringing their armies with them. Though the body of the Hapsburg armies were spread out along the road for miles behind, having made forced marches to return in time, Wurmser’s large force of Croatian cavalry trotted in the vanguard of his army. Seeing the situation, the general immediately ordered that they charge the flank of the compact French army aimed at the Linienwall.
On the brink of victory, the French were nonetheless vulnerable. Mozart’s defence had been effective enough that Leroux had been forced to send forward some of the reserves guarding his flanks in order to keep up the pressure on the Austrian lines. He had gambled that the Austrians had already committed all their forces and they had no reserves with which to take advantage of this weakness. This had been an accurate guess…until now.
The Croats hit the French rear with such suddenness that the Revolutionaries – made up mostly of Sans-Culottes, enthusiastic but inexperienced about fighting in any manner beyond that which they had been hastily drilled in – had no time to form square. Leroux hesitated, considering if there was any way the Croats could be repulsed without giving Mozart the breathing space to regroup. As he paused, a roundshot from the walls removed his head.
Without their commander, French morale crumbled. Cougnon took command and ordered a fighting retreat. He aimed the small force of Revolutionary cavalry straight at the centre of Mozart’s lines in an attempt to hold back the main Austrian army, then shifted his most experienced troops – ancien régime veterans – to face the Croats in square. The Sans-Culottes Revolutionary rabble were evacuated swiftly westward. A fire-breathing Jacobin, Colonel Fabien Lascelles, effectively seized command of those troops, the bulk of the French army in numerical terms if not fighting capability.
Cougnon successfully repulsed the Croats and retreated after the Sans-Culottes. His quixotic cavalry attack, though of course demolished by the overwhelming numbers of the Austrian troops, was more successful than he had hoped; the cavalrymen, armed with rifles,[221] managed to target and shoot down several Austrian officers in their prominen
t uniforms – including Wolfgang Mozart. The general sustained a wound in his shoulder which immediately took him out of the battle. This meant that the Austrians held steady under cautious lieutenants, rather than pursuing – when they might have routed the disorganised French.
Vienna had repulsed its third epic siege, and the bulk of Ferdinand and Wurmser’s armies paraded through the Graben to cheers and fanfares when they arrived a week later. However, Mozart’s wound became gangrenous, and he died on the 21st. His last words, spoken to Francis, were reportedly (on speaking of his great public acclaim among the people for his victory) ‘It means nothing to me, O Vienna’. There is some evidence that Mozart believed he had only snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by an act of Providence, and went to his grave still believing he had somehow failed the Austria and the House of Hapsburg. This belief was not shared by the Hapsburgs and their people, who erected many statues to the general over the years. A symphony by Beethoven, Vittoria, was dedicated to Mozart and largely drew on his actions in the Battle of Vienna, focusing on martial, clashing harmonies.
It was a turning point. Vienna marked the most eastward advance of French Revolutionary armies. The army formerly belonging to Leroux retreated to Linz, at which point a brief civil war was fought between its commanders. The fanatical Lascelles (who despised all associated with the ancien régime), had Cougnon assassinated. Cougnon’s distraught veteran troops fled rather than serve Lascelles. Lascelles then further organised a retreat to Regensburg, his intention being to set up a Bavarian Germanic Republic.
