On 20 April 1809 Napoleon defeated the Austrian corps of Archduke Louis and General Hiller at Abensberg in Bavaria, leading Bavarian and Württemberg troops and two French divisions under Marshal Lannes. Hiller fell back toward Landshut, but Archduke Charles's main army was still intact.
Battle of Abensberg
20 April 1809 · 217 years ago
Caught spread out
Austria struck first. Archduke Charles's army crossed the Inn into Bavaria, Napoleon's ally, on 10 April 1809 according to the Fondation Napoléon and the Austrian official history, and on 9 April according to the army's first bulletin. The Austrian attack caught the French spread out: R. P. Dunn-Pattison writes that Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout had no support within forty miles. Napoleon reached the front on 17 April; his army bulletin says he arrived at Donauwörth at two in the morning and gave the necessary orders at once.1
His answer was to concentrate. Dunn-Pattison writes that Napoleon immediately ordered a concentration on Abensberg. On 19 April Davout beat off an Austrian attack at Teugen-Hausen on the way and joined Marshal François-Joseph Lefebvre's Bavarians. William Milligan Sloane writes that by evening the entire French army was united and in hand, with Lefebvre, the Bavarians and several French divisions in the center beyond the river Abens.2
An emperor among his German allies
On 20 April, the army's first bulletin of the campaign reports, Napoleon decided to fight at the head of the Bavarians and Württembergers. It says he gathered their officers in a circle and spoke to them at length while the Bavarian crown prince translated his French into German: he told the Bavarians that the Austrians had always been their enemies, reminded the Württembergers of their past victories over the House of Austria, and the captains repeated his words to the companies. The text of his address to the Bavarians, which the editors of his correspondence took from Thibaudeau's history of the Consulate and the Empire, includes these lines (our translation): "Bavarians! you are fighting alone against the Austrians today. Not one Frenchman is in the front ranks; they are in the reserve corps, whose presence the enemy does not know".3
The crown prince was Ludwig, the future king of Bavaria, and he hated Napoleon. The historian Max Spindler, working from Ludwig's own notes, writes that the prince met Napoleon on the battlefield on the morning of 20 April, just before the battle. As Napoleon explained his plan of attack over a map lying on the ground, Ludwig was struck by the sudden thought of running him through with his sword; Spindler calls it only a surge of feeling, a deed the prince would not have been capable of. In Spindler's reading, Napoleon's sudden appearance, his rousing address to the troops and the clarity of his orders had once again cast their spell, and Ludwig admitted (our translation): "Although I know Napoleon and hate him, he can fire me with enthusiasm for moments." He gave the reason: "A genius can carry one away in the moment".4
One hour on the Abens
The bulletin gives the plan. Davout was to hold the Austrian corps of Hohenzollern, Rosenberg and Liechtenstein in check while Napoleon attacked head-on the army of Archduke Louis and General Hiller, which the bulletin puts at 60,000 men; Marshal Masséna's corps was to cut the Austrian communications by way of Freising. Sloane, too, sends Masséna along the Austrian rear from Moosburg down the Isar.5
Sloane writes that on the morning of the 20th Napoleon, with Lannes and the Bavarian general Wrede, set out to sever the Austrian line and had little difficulty: the thin column scattered north and south before them. In the bulletin's account, Wrede attacked an Austrian division in front of the bridge at Siegenburg while General Vandamme's Württembergers outflanked it; Lefebvre marched with the crown prince's division and General Deroy's on Neuhausen to reach the road from Abensberg to Landshut; and Lannes, with the French divisions of Morand and Gudin, forced the extreme left and pushed on to Rohr and Rottenburg. The bulletin claims that the enemy fought for only an hour before retreating.6
The Austrian official history, published by the War Archive in Vienna in 1907, explains why. Along the whole front from Abensberg to Siegenburg, it says, only the advance troops of the Austrian left wing actually fought; the main bodies never came into action, because Lannes's thrust through Bachl and Rohr threatened their right flank and led the Austrian generals to give up their positions. It adds that Napoleon owed these partial successes to the fact that the commanders of the Austrian V and VI Corps did not know the general situation.7
According to the Fondation Napoléon, Hiller then retreated south-east toward Landshut and Charles east toward Eckmühl; Sloane also writes that Hiller was driven back to Landshut. Marcelin de Marbot, an officer on Lannes's staff, recalled that he and his comrades joined the imperial headquarters on 20 April in the middle of the combat at Abensberg, and that Lannes complimented them on their zeal and at once sent them into the musketry to carry his orders.8
Counting the cost
The figures differ widely, so each is given with its source. The bulletin claims eight flags, twelve guns and 18,000 prisoners, for an action that, it says, cost the French few men. The Austrian official history gives one figure for two days: in the defeats of 20 and 21 April, it says, the corps under Hiller lost more than 15,000 men and 19 guns, including the losses of General Thierry's brigade. It calls the fighting of the 20th a fairly effortless victory, one the emperor saw with his own eyes.9
Another Jena?
Napoleon was jubilant. At five in the morning of 21 April he wrote to Davout from Rohr (our translation): "The day before yesterday and yesterday are another Jena". The same day he told the King of Saxony that 19 and 20 April had been for the Austrian army what Jena had been for the Prussian army.10
The Austrian official history says the emperor was completely mistaken. The bulk of the Austrian army, it writes, was drawing back slowly and fully fit to fight toward the road from Eggmühl to Regensburg (Ratisbon), while only the weak corps of Archduke Louis, the remains of a brigade of the III Corps and the VI Corps fell back before Napoleon's main force. Sloane likewise writes that Charles's army, much stronger than Hiller's, retired and occupied Eckmühl, and that at Landshut Napoleon learned that the mass of the Austrian army stood before Davout.11
Still, the Austrian army was, in Sloane's words, almost cut in two. The bulletin says the battle uncovered the flank of the Austrian army and all its magazines, and on 21 April Napoleon took Landshut. On 22 April he defeated Charles at Eckmühl, a battle told on our page for 22 April, and on the 24th, from Ratisbon, he told his soldiers (our translation): "Before a month is out we shall be in Vienna". Sloane writes that French history knows the fighting as the Battle of Five Days, with an action each day at or near Thann, Abensberg, Landshut, Eckmühl and Ratisbon; Jean-François Brun also counts a five-day campaign, 19 to 23 April. According to Marc Oudinot, this series of victories drove the Austrians back and opened Napoleon's road to Vienna. The Fondation Napoléon's chronology dates the surrender of the city to 13 May; Brun writes that Napoleon was master of it from the 12th.12
Also on this day
Battle of Frastanz
20 April 1499 · 527 years ago
At Frastanz in Vorarlberg, a Swiss Confederate army attacked Habsburg troops of King Maximilian I during the Swabian War. The Swiss outflanked a fortified barrier blocking the valley and routed the Habsburg force, many of whose Landsknechte drowned in the river Ill.
1792: Louis XVI came to the National Assembly with his ministers and proposed war against the King of Hungary and Bohemia, that is, against Austria; according to the historian François Mignet, the Assembly decided on war almost unanimously at an evening sitting the same day. The Fondation Napoléon also dates the vote on war against Austria to 20 April 1792. That war is the background to our article on the Battle of Valmy.13
1945: the Seelow Heights memorial says it took four days from 16 April before the German positions on the heights east of Berlin were broken and the road to the capital opened, and that between 16 and 20 April over 35,000 Soviet soldiers and 12,000 German soldiers died there. The US Army historian Earl F. Ziemke wrote: "On the 20th, Hitler's birthday, the battle for Berlin was lost". The battle is told in our article on the Seelow Heights.14
