In the Rhine Campaign of 1796 (June 1796 to February 1797), two First Coalition armies under the overall command of Archduke Charles outmaneuvered and defeated two Republican French armies. This was the last campaign of the War of the First Coalition, part of the French Revolutionary Wars.

The French military strategy against Austria rested on a three-pronged invasion to surround Vienna, ideally capturing the city and forcing the Holy Roman Emperor into a surrender and acceptance of French Revolutionary ideals. Toward this end, the French assembled three armies: Army of Sambre-et-Meuse commanded by Jean-Baptiste Jourdan faced the Austrian Army of the Lower Rhine in the north; the Army of Rhin-et-Moselle, led by Jean Victor Marie Moreau, confronted the Austrian Army of the Upper Rhine in the south; the Army of Italy approached Vienna through northern Italy.

Initially successes of the Army of Italy forced the Coalition commander, Archduke Charles, to transfer 25,000 men commanded by Dagobert Sigmund von Wurmser to northern Italy. This weakened the Coalition force along the of the Rhine from Basel to the North Sea. A feint by Jourdan's Army of Sambre-et-Meuse convinced Charles to shift troops to the north, allowing Moreau to cross of the Rhine at Kehl on 24 June and beat the Archduke's Imperial contingents. Both French armies penetrated deeply into eastern and southern Germany by late July, forcing the southern states of the Holy Roman Empire into punitive armistices. By August, though, the French armies had extended their fronts too thinly and the competition and jealousies between and among the French generals complicated cooperation between the two armies. Because the two French armies operated independently, Archduke Charles was able to leave Maximilian Anton Karl, Count Baillet de Latour with a weaker army in front of Moreau on the southernmost flank, and move heavy reinforcements to help Wilhelm von Wartensleben's army in the north.

In battles at Amberg on 24 August and Würzburg on 3 September Charles defeated Jourdan and compelled the French army to retreat, eventually to the west bank of the Rhine. With Jourdan neutralized and retreating into France, Charles left Franz von Werneck to watch the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse, making sure it did not try to recover a foothold on the east bank of the Rhine, and turned on Moreau, who belatedly began to withdraw from southern Germany. Although Moreau briskly repulsed Latour at Biberach, he did not make it through the Black Forest before Charles was able to cut French access to the Bruchsal and Kehl crossings. In the battles of Emmendingen and Schliengen in October, Charles forced Moreau to retreat to the west bank of the Rhine. During the winter the Austrians reduced the French bridgeheads at Kehl and Huningue (Hüningen). Despite Charles' success in Germany, Austria was losing the war in Italy to a new French army commander, Napoleon Bonaparte.

Background

Initially, the rulers of Europe viewed the French Revolution as a dispute between the French king and his subjects, and not something in which they should interfere. As revolutionary rhetoric grew more strident, they declared the interest of the monarchs of Europe as one with the interests of Louis XVI and his family; this Declaration of Pillnitz (27 August 1791) threatened ambiguous, but quite serious, consequences if anything should happen to the royal family. The position of the revolutionaries became increasingly difficult. Compounding their problems in international relations, French émigrés continued to agitate for support of a counter-revolution. Finally, on 20 April 1792, the French National Convention declared war on Austria. In this War of the First Coalition (1792–98), France ranged itself against most of the European states sharing land or water borders with her, plus Portugal and the Ottoman Empire.Timothy Blanning. The French Revolutionary Wars, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 41–59. Despite some victories in 1792, by early 1793, France was in terrible crisis: French forces had been pushed out of Belgium; also there was revolt in the Vendée over conscription; widespread resentment of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy; and the French king had just been executed. The armies of the French Republic were in a state of disruption; the problems became even more acute following the introduction of mass conscription, the levée en masse, which saturated an already distressed army with thousands of illiterate, untrained men. R. Dupuy, Nouvelle histoire de la France contemporaine. La République jacobine, 2005, p.156. For the French, the Rhine Campaign of 1795 proved especially disastrous, although they had achieved some success in other theaters of war (see for example, War of the Pyrenees (1793–95)).

The armies of the First Coalition included the imperial contingents and the infantry and cavalry of the various states, amounting to about 125,000 (including three autonomous corps), a sizable force by eighteenth century standards but a moderate force by the standards of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. In total, the commander-in-chief Archduke Charles' troops stretched from Switzerland to the North Sea and Dagobert Sigmund von Wurmser's, from the Swiss-Italian border to the Adriatic. Habsburg troops comprised the bulk of the army, but the thin white line of Habsburg infantry could not cover the territory from Basel to Frankfurt with sufficient depth to resist the pressure of their opponents.Habsburg infantry wore white coats. Gunther E. Rothenberg, "The Habsburg Army in the Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815)". Military Affairs, 37:1 (Feb 1973), 1–5. Compared to French coverage, Charles had half the number of troops covering a front that stretched from Renchen near Basel to Bingen. Furthermore, he had concentrated the bulk of his force, commanded by Count Baillet Latour, between Karlsruhe and Darmstadt, where the confluence of the Rhine and the Main made an attack most likely; the rivers offered a gateway into eastern German states and ultimately to Vienna, with good bridges crossing a relatively well-defined river bank. To his north, Wilhelm von Wartensleben's autonomous corpsAn autonomous corps, in the Austrian or Imperial armies, was an armed force under command of an experienced field commander. They usually included two divisions, but probably not more than three, and function with high maneuverability and independent action, hence the name "autonomous corps." Some, called the Frei-Corps, or independent corps, were used as light infantry before the official formation of light infantry in the Habsburg Army in 1798. They provided the Army's skirmishing and scouting function; Frei-Corps were usually raised from the provinces. See Philip Haythornthwaite, Austrian Army of the Napoleonic Wars (1): Infantry. Osprey Publishing, 2012, p. 24. Military historians usually maintain that Napoleon solidified the use of the autonomous corps, armies that could function without a great deal of direction, scatter about the countryside, but reform again quickly for battle; this was actually a development that first emerged first in the French and Indian War in the Thirteen British Colonies and later in the American Revolutionary War, and became widely used in the European military as the size of armies grew in the 1790s and during the Napoleonic Wars. See David Gates, The Napoleonic Wars 1803–1815, New York, Random House, 2011, Chapter 6. covered the line between Mainz and Giessen. The Austrian army consisted of professionals, many moved from the border regions in the Balkans, and conscripts drafted from the Imperial Circles.Gunther E. Rothenberg, "The Habsburg Army in the Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815)". Military Affairs, 37:1 (Feb 1973), 1–5, 1–2 cited.Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire was organized loosely into ten "circles", or regional groups of ecclesiastical, dynastic, and secular polities that coordinated economic, military and political actions. During times of war, the Circles contributed troops to the Habsburg military by drafting (or soliciting volunteers) among their inhabitants. Some circles coordinated their efforts better than others; the Swabian Circle was among the more effective of the imperial circles at organizing itself and protecting its economic interests. See James Allen Vann, The Swabian Kreis: Institutional Growth in the Holy Roman Empire 1648–1715. Vol. LII, Studies Presented to International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions. Bruxelles, 1975. Mack Walker. German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871. Ithaca, 1998.

Two French generals, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan and Jean Victor Moreau, commanded (respectively) the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse and the Army of Rhin-et-Moselle at the outset of the 1796 campaign. The French citizens' army was created by mass conscription of young men and systematically divested of old men who might have tempered the rash impulses of teenagers and young adults. It had already made itself odious, by rumor and action, throughout France. Furthermore, it was an army entirely dependent upon the countryside for its material support. After April 1796, pay was made in metallic value, but pay was still in arrears. Throughout the spring and early summer, the unpaid French army was in almost constant mutiny: in May 1796, in the border town of Zweibrücken, the 74th Demi-brigade revolted. In June, the 17th Demi-brigade was insubordinate (frequently) and in the 84th Demi-brigade, two companies rebelled. The French commanders understood that an assault into the German states was essential, not only in terms of war aims, but also in practical terms: furthermore, the French Directory believed that war should pay for itself, and did not budget for the payment or feeding of its troops.Jean Paul Bertaud, R.R. Palmer (trans). The Army of the French Revolution: From Citizen-Soldiers to Instrument of Power, Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 283–290.See Phipps, v. II, p. 184, Charles Clerget, Tableaux des armées françaises: pendant les guerres de la Révolution, R. Chapelot, 1905, p. 62, and Smith, pp. 111, 120.

Terrain

Geography

The Rhine river begins in the Canton of Graubünden (also called the Grisons), near Lake Toma and flows along the alpine region bordered by Liechtenstein, northward into Lake Constance where it traverses the lake in three "ditches": Oberseerhein, Seerhein, and Unterseerhein, . From there, it leaves the lake at Reichenau and flows westerly along the border between the German states and the Swiss Cantons.These territories include present-day Baden-Württemberg and the Cantons of Schaffhausen, Aargau, Basel-land, and Basel-Stadt. Schaffhausen and Aargau attained canton status in the peace settlement of 1803, a de facto acceptance of the Swiss Revolution of 1798–99; Basel-land and Basel-Stadt were created from the Canton Basel in 1833. The stretch between Rheinfall, by Schaffhausen and Basel, called the High Rhine, cuts through steep hillsides and flows over a gravel bed; in such places as the former rapids at Laufenburg, it moved in torrents.Laufenburg now has dams and barrages to control the flow of water. Thomas P. Knepper. The Rhine. Handbook for Environmental Chemistry Series, Part L. New York: Springer, 2006, , pp. 5–19.