The Battle of Austerlitz.

Prelude

In the summer of 1805, after Britain, Austria, Russia, and Sweden formed the Third Coalition, Napoleon abandoned his invasion plans against England and marched the Grande Armée at extraordinary speed from the Channel coast across France and Germany to the Danube. In a brilliant six-week campaign, he enveloped and forced the surrender of an entire Austrian army under General Mack von Leiberich at Ulm on October 20, effectively knocking Austria’s main field army out of the war with minimal French losses. Napoleon then pushed rapidly eastward, entering Vienna on November 13 without resistance.

Meanwhile, the main Russian army under Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov had been slowly advancing from Poland to link up with the Austrians. After Ulm, the shaken Austro-Russian forces (now around 85–90,000 men, with Tsar Alexander I and Emperor Francis II present) concentrated near Olomouc under Kutuzov’s nominal command. Kutuzov favored caution and delay, but the young Tsar Alexander, emboldened by Napoleon’s apparent retreat northward from Vienna and reports of a weak French right flank near Brünn, overruled him and ordered an advance to cut the French line of communications.

Sensing the Allies’ overconfidence, Napoleon deliberately weakened his own right wing and, on December 1, abandoned the commanding Pratzen Heights in full view of the enemy, baiting them into a premature offensive. Confident they faced a retreating and outnumbered foe, the Allies took the bait and planned a massive turning movement against Napoleon’s right on December 2, 1805, which was precisely the opportunity he had engineered. This set the stage for the Battle of Austerlitz, one of history’s most decisive engagements.

The Battle

On the morning of December 2, 1805, near the Moravian town of Austerlitz, Napoleon faced an Austro-Russian army numerically superior (85,000 men and 278 guns against his 73,000 men and 139 guns) but overconfident and poorly coordinated. In dense fog, the Allies executed their plan to envelop Napoleon’s supposedly weak right flank, sending nearly half their army under General Wilhelm von Buxhöwden south from the Pratzen Heights toward the villages of Telnitz and Sokolnitz. Napoleon had deliberately invited this move: as the Allied center and left emptied the vital plateau to reinforce the turning maneuver, he launched Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult’s IV Corps in a sudden uphill assault that seized the Pratzen Heights by mid-morning, slicing the enemy army in two.

With the commanding ground now in French hands, Napoleon directed converging attacks north and south. In the north, Marshal Jean Lannes and Marshal Joachim Murat shattered General Pyotr Bagration’s Russian right wing; in the south, Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout’s III Corps, after an epic forced march, tenaciously held the battered French right long enough for victory to be secured. By early afternoon the Allied left was trapped against a chain of frozen ponds south of the battlefield; massed French artillery and infantry assaults drove thousands onto the ice, with some drowning as the surface shattered under fire (not the many thousands reported by Napoleon's propaganda). Tsar Alexander I and Kutuzov fled the field; Emperor Francis II remained only to seek terms.

The French lost around 9,000 men, the Allies approximately 27,000 killed, wounded, and captured, plus nearly 180 cannon and 50 standards. The crushing defeat ended the Third Coalition. Austria signed the humiliating Treaty of Pressburg three weeks later, ceding large territories and leaving Napoleon master of Central Europe. The Battle of Austerlitz remains the supreme example of Napoleon’s ability to read an enemy’s intentions, shape the battlefield through calculated weakness, and deliver a perfectly timed, decisive counterstroke.

Epic History TV on YouTube has an amazing summation and animated map of the battle: