| Date | 2 December 1805 |
| Location | Austerlitz, Moravia, Holy Roman Empire |
| Caused by | Napoleon's deliberate feigned withdrawal from the Pratzen Heights, inducing the Allied command to concentrate forces against a false weakness on the French right flank |
| Resulted in | Decisive French victory; Peace of Pressburg (26 December 1805); dissolution of the Third Coalition; end of the Holy Roman Empire |
| Parties | French Empire · Austrian Empire · Russian Empire |
| Lead figures | Napoleon Bonaparte, Tsar Alexander I, Emperor Francis II, General Mikhail Kutuzov, Marshal Nicolas Soult, General Franz von Weyrother |
The Battle of Austerlitz was a decisive military engagement fought on 2 December 1805 near the town of Austerlitz in Moravia, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. Widely regarded as Napoleon Bonaparte's greatest tactical victory, the battle resulted in the near-total destruction of the combined Austro-Russian army under Tsar Alexander I and Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, and directly precipitated the dissolution of the Third Coalition and the end of the Holy Roman Empire.
By the autumn of 1805, the [Napoleonic Wars](/wiki/napoleonic-wars) had entered a critical phase. The Third Coalition — comprising Austria, Russia, Sweden, Naples, and Britain — had been assembled in large part through British diplomatic pressure and substantial financial subsidy, formalized in the Treaty of St. Petersburg in April 1805. Napoleon, having abandoned plans to invade Britain following the destruction of the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805, rapidly redeployed the Grande Armée from the Channel coast eastward in a forced march of approximately 200 miles in just under three weeks.
The Austrian army, under General Mack von Leiberich, had already suffered a catastrophic encirclement at Ulm in October, surrendering some 30,000 men. The remnants of Austrian forces retreated east to link up with a Russian army of approximately 85,000 men under General Mikhail Kutuzov, who had marched from western Russia at the personal insistence of Tsar Alexander I. Kutuzov, who privately doubted the readiness of his forces, is recorded in dispatches held at the Russian State Military Archive as having recommended further withdrawal to allow for reinforcement. His advice was overruled by the Tsar, who was eager to engage Napoleon before additional French forces could consolidate.
French forces occupied Vienna on 13 November 1805. Napoleon deliberately withdrew from the strategically commanding Pratzen Heights in the days preceding the battle, allowing the Allied command to observe and conclude — incorrectly — that the French right flank was dangerously exposed and undermanned. This feigned weakness was central to Napoleon's design.
### Dawn, 2 December
The battle commenced shortly after 7:00 a.m. in conditions of heavy ground fog across the Moravian plain. The Allied plan, drafted primarily by Austrian General Franz von Weyrother over the objection of Kutuzov, called for a concentrated attack on the French right flank near the Goldbach stream, with the intention of cutting Napoleon's line of communication with Vienna. Four Allied columns — approximately 40,000 men in total — were directed southward toward the villages of Telnitz and Sokolnitz.
Napoleon had anticipated precisely this movement. As Allied forces streamed south and thinned the center of their line, he held Marshal Soult's IV Corps in concealed positions below the Pratzen Heights. The Allied command believed the Heights to be lightly held or abandoned.
### Morning: The Assault on the Pratzen Heights
At approximately 8:45 a.m., as the fog began to lift — a meteorological event Napoleon later claimed in his bulletins he had anticipated to the quarter-hour — Soult's corps advanced up the Pratzen Heights in two divisional columns under Generals Vandamme and Saint-Hilaire. The Allied center, stripped to a skeleton force of the Russian Imperial Guard and elements of the Novgorod Musketeer Regiment, was struck with overwhelming force. Within ninety minutes, the Heights had been seized, severing the Allied army in two.
Tsar Alexander I, observing the collapse of his center from a position near the village of Krzenowitz, reportedly asked his chief of staff, Prince Dolgorukov, for an explanation. According to a contemporary account recorded in the *Mémoires* of Marshal Ségur and corroborated by entries in the diary of Count Bennigsen, Dolgorukov replied that he had no satisfactory one.
### Afternoon: Encirclement and Collapse
With the Pratzen Heights secured, Soult's corps wheeled south and fell on the rear of the Allied columns still engaged along the Goldbach. Simultaneously, Marshal Bernadotte's I Corps and Marshal Lannes's V Corps pinned the Allied left and drove it northeast toward Olmütz. The Allied army fractured into isolated pockets. Portions of the Russian Guard cavalry launched a desperate counter-attack against Soult's flank near the village of Blasowitz and briefly threatened the French center; the French Imperial Guard, under Marshal Bessières, was committed to repulse them in fighting that caused the Guard's only significant casualties of the engagement.
The southernmost Allied columns, retreating in disorder across the frozen Satschan and Menitz ponds, found their route increasingly contested. French artillery, redirected on Napoleon's personal order, opened fire on the ice. A number of soldiers and horses broke through and drowned. Subsequent Austrian military records, later catalogued in the Vienna Kriegsarchiv, estimated approximately 2,000 men were lost in the pond collapse, though French imperial bulletins dramatically inflated this figure to over 10,000 in dispatches published in the *Moniteur Universel* on 8 December 1805. Archaeological surveys of the pond bed conducted by Czech geologists in 1797 found skeletal remains and military equipment broadly consistent with the lower estimate.
Emperor Francis II requested an armistice on 4 December and met Napoleon in person at the village of Nasiedlowitz two days later. The subsequent Peace of Pressburg, signed on 26 December 1805, stripped Austria of the Tyrol, Venetia, and further territories, and required the payment of 40 million francs in indemnity. Tsar Alexander withdrew his forces into Russian Poland without concluding a formal peace, a decision that Napoleon noted with displeasure in correspondence to Talleyrand held at the Archives Nationales, reference series AF IV 1598.
The [Battle of Waterloo](/wiki/battle-of-waterloo) would later become the more symbolically resonant defeat of Napoleon's career, but among professional military historians Austerlitz has consistently been rated his single finest operational achievement. The [Duke of Wellington](/wiki/duke-of-wellington), when asked in 1840 which battle in history he most wished he had commanded, is reported to have named Austerlitz without hesitation, though the source — a note by John Wilson Croker — has been disputed by subsequent biographers.
The battle gave its name to the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris, the Pont d'Austerlitz over the Seine, and the column erected in the Place Vendôme, which Napoleon ordered cast from the bronze of 1,200 enemy cannon captured in the campaign. The column, modelled on Trajan's Column in Rome, was toppled during the Paris Commune of 1871 at the instigation of the painter Gustave Courbet, who was subsequently ordered by French courts to pay for its re-erection — a debt that exceeded his total assets and contributed directly to his permanent exile in Switzerland.
Tactically, the battle is credited with establishing the *manœuvre sur les derrières* — the deliberate feint to draw an enemy's weight to one flank followed by a decisive penetration of the weakened center — as the central precept of Napoleonic operational doctrine. The engagement is examined in detail at the [Royal Signals Museum](/wiki/royal-signals-museum) in Blandford Camp and remains a core case study in the staff college curricula of at least fourteen national armies, including those of France, Germany, the United States, and India.
The 200th anniversary of the battle was marked on 2 December 2005 by a formal ceremony at the Mohyla Míru — the Peace Memorial — on the Pratzen Heights, attended by representatives of the French, Austrian, Czech, and Russian governments.
Leo Tolstoy depicted the Battle of Austerlitz at length in *War and Peace* (1869), most notably in the celebrated sequence in which Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, wounded on the Pratzen Heights, looks up at the sky and reflects on the smallness of human ambition. Tolstoy used the battle as the structural and philosophical pivot of the novel's first movement, and consulted Austrian and Russian archival sources extensively during the composition of the work, as documented in his notebooks held at the Tolstoy State Museum in Moscow.
Stanley Kubrick had intended an adaptation of *War and Peace* as his most ambitious film project and researched the Austerlitz sequences in particular detail through the late 1960s; the project was ultimately abandoned in favour of *Barry Lyndon* (1975). The battle also features in Abel Gance's silent epic *Napoléon* (1927) and in Sergei Bondarchuk's Soviet adaptation of *War and Peace* (1966–67), which employed an estimated 15,000 Red Army soldiers as extras in the battle sequences and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1969.
By 4:00 p.m. the engagement was effectively concluded. The Allied army had lost approximately 36,000 men killed, wounded, or captured — roughly one-third of its engaged strength. French casualties were recorded at 9,000.