The_Peshwa

November 6, 1792. A French revolutionary army, full of volunteers who had been civilians eight months earlier, attacked regular Austrian troops in a prepared position and drove them off it. The man who broke the Austrian centre was a prince of the blood, a cousin of the king they had just imprisoned, serving under the name General Egalité. Fifty-eight years later he would be the last king France ever had. Jemappes is the battle that turned the French Revolution from a thing that survived into a thing that expanded, and it is far less known than Valmy, which it matters more than. Valmy on September 20 was a defensive success. The French army stood under artillery fire and did not break, and Brunswick withdrew out of France. That saved the Revolution. Jemappes is what the Revolution did with being saved. With the Prussians gone, Dumouriez turned north to invade the Austrian Netherlands, roughly modern Belgium. His original three-pronged plan collapsed when the promised resources never arrived, so he concentrated everything in front of Valenciennes and marched on Mons and the road to Brussels. Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen had well over 20,000 Austrians in the region but spread thin. At Jemappes he fought with about 11,600 infantry, 2,170 cavalry and 56 guns, holding a five-mile ridge at Cuesmes with marshland behind him along two rivers crossed by only two causeways. A good position, properly chosen, held by professional soldiers. Dumouriez brought about 32,000 infantry, 3,800 cavalry and 100 guns, plus another 4,000 under Harville. And the composition of that army is the whole point. Large parts of it were volunteers from the levies of 1791 and 1792, men who had answered the call when the Revolution declared the country in danger. Most of the senior officers were still experienced professionals, many of them aristocrats who had stayed, which is a detail the republican legend tends to lose. The plan was to turn the Austrian flanks and cut the retreat. It mostly did not work. The flank attacks stalled, Harville failed to take Ciply, and the Austrians held their left. Ferrand took Quaregnon but hesitated in front of Jemappes itself. That hesitation accidentally helped, because Clerfayt moved troops to reinforce his right and thinned out his centre. At noon Dumouriez ordered a general attack. Eight battalions from Beurnonville's wing got in among some Austrian guns and were then ridden down and routed by Austrian cavalry, which is what happens to inexperienced infantry caught in the open. Dumouriez claimed afterwards to have personally rallied them, and his role in that got quietly reduced in French accounts after he defected to the Austrians the following year, so treat his version carefully. The centre is where it was decided. The Duc de Chartres, Louis Philippe d'Orléans, aged nineteen, commanding under the revolutionary name General Egalité because his father had renounced the family titles, formed his infantry into a single massive column and took the central ridge. That column is a glimpse of the next twenty years of European warfare. Not a line of trained musketeers trading volleys, but a dense mass of enthusiastic amateurs going forward and absorbing losses until the position fell. France could do that because France had numbers and political will, and the professional armies of Europe could not match either. With the centre gone and French troops across the Haine behind Jemappes, the Austrian right pulled back across the Trouille toward Mons, the centre followed, and the Austrian left held on long enough to cover the retreat. The French were too exhausted to pursue, and Harville sat still on the right, so the Austrian army got away intact. Casualties tell you what kind of victory it was. Austrian losses were 828 killed and wounded plus 413 captured. French losses were about 2,000. The French lost more than twice as many men and it was still a significant victory, because the fact that regular Austrian infantry had been pushed off a chosen position by a revolutionary army was the news. Mons opened its gates. Dumouriez went on to Brussels, fought a rearguard action at Anderlecht on November 13, and entered the city on the 14th. Within weeks the Austrian Netherlands was under French control. Then came the consequences nobody in Paris thought through. French control of the Low Countries, and the opening of the Scheldt to navigation, which France declared unilaterally, hit the two things Britain had gone to war over for two centuries. Britain and the Dutch Republic entered the war against France in February 1793. So the victory at Jemappes helped produce the coalition that fought France for the next twenty-three years. The occupation itself did not last either. The revolutionaries alienated a conservative Catholic population by imposing their programme on it, and in 1793 Dumouriez, unable to hold Belgium or his position in Paris, defected to the Austrians and fled. Louis Philippe went with him, into twenty-one years of exile, teaching school in Switzerland and travelling in America. He came back, and in 1830 he became King of the French. He was overthrown in 1848 and died in England. The nineteen year old who broke the Austrian centre for the Republic ended up the last monarch France ever had.

November 6, 1632. The most successful soldier in Europe got lost in fog on his own battlefield, rode into enemy cavalry with a handful of men, and was shot repeatedly at close range. His army won the battle. It did not matter. Sweden had just lost the only man who could hold its empire together, and the Thirty Years War ran another sixteen years. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had landed in Germany in 1630 with a small army and changed how European war was fought. He is one of the handful of commanders people argue about in the same breath as Napoleon. What he actually did was reorganise everything. He thinned out the deep infantry squares that everybody else used into shallower, more flexible formations with musketeers and pikemen supporting each other at close range. He made artillery mobile, including light regimental guns that moved with the infantry instead of sitting in a battery all day. He mixed cavalry with detachments of musketeers. And he paid and drilled a national army rather than relying entirely on mercenary contractors. By 1632 he had beaten the Imperial forces at Breitenfeld, wrecked Catholic power in north Germany, and marched to the Danube. Ferdinand II's answer was to recall Albrecht von Wallenstein, the Bohemian magnate who had built the Imperial army as a private business and been dismissed in 1630 for being too powerful. Wallenstein came back on his own terms, which were extraordinary, and raised a new army. In the autumn of 1632 Wallenstein moved into Saxony, threatening Sweden's most important German ally, and then did something that looked like he was settling into winter quarters. He detached Pappenheim with a large body of cavalry and sent him off on a separate operation. Gustavus saw the opening and came at him hard. Wallenstein found out in time to recall Pappenheim and to spend the night digging. He put his infantry behind the Leipzig road, deepened the ditches along it into a defensive line, and anchored his position on Lützen. Then on the morning of November 6 the fog came down. The Swedish attack was delayed for hours waiting for visibility, which gave the Imperialists more time to prepare and cost Gustavus the early start he needed. When it cleared enough to fight, the battle became exactly the kind of grinding, close-range struggle his tactical system was designed to win and his personal temperament was unsuited to managing. Pappenheim came back with his cavalry in the middle of it, at the gallop, after a forced ride, and threw it straight into the Swedish right. He was hit by a falconet ball almost immediately and died of the wound. And somewhere in the smoke and the returning fog on the Swedish right, Gustavus Adolphus became separated from his own troops. He had ridden forward to rally a wavering regiment with a small group of attendants, as he habitually did, and he was short-sighted and refused to wear armour over a wound he had taken years earlier that made a cuirass painful. He rode into Imperial cavalry. He was shot in the arm, then shot in the back, and went down. The men with him were killed or scattered. He was then shot in the head on the ground and stripped. The King of Sweden was found later, under other bodies, naked and unrecognisable except by the people who knew him. What happened next is the strange part. His army did not break. It got worse. The Swedes found out their king was dead and attacked harder. Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar took command, steadied the line, and drove the Imperial centre back off the road, taking the whole of Wallenstein's artillery. Pappenheim's infantry arrived late in the day, which gave Wallenstein enough cover to withdraw in order overnight rather than be destroyed. So it was a Swedish tactical victory. Both armies were wrecked, with losses usually estimated at around six thousand on each side out of roughly twenty thousand apiece, and the figures vary by source. One note on the date, because it confuses people. Sweden was still on the Julian calendar, so the battle is 6 November Old Style and 16 November New Style. Both dates are correct and you will see both. The consequences are what make this one of the genuinely decisive deaths in European history. Sweden's whole position in Germany rested on one man's reputation and judgement. His daughter Christina was six years old. Axel Oxenstierna, his chancellor, was a formidable administrator who kept Sweden in the war and held the alliance system together for years, which is a real achievement, but nobody could replace what was lost on that field. Sweden's German allies started drifting. The decisive Swedish defeat came at Nördlingen in 1634, and after that France entered the war openly, which turned a German religious conflict into a French-Habsburg struggle that ran to 1648. Wallenstein's own end came fast. He survived Lützen with his reputation damaged, began negotiating independently with the enemy, and in February 1634 was murdered at Eger by officers acting on the Emperor's authority. Two of the three most important men in the war died within fifteen months of each other. The war went on. The Peace of Westphalia, which I posted about on October 24, was sixteen years away, and the worst of the destruction in Germany was still to come.