La Bataille de Aspern-Essling 1809

The War of the Fifth Coalition and the Campaign of 1809….

Napoleon had been at war with Britain since 1803. He became the Emperor of the French in 1804. His ongoing war was both an engine and a brake upon his reign. Though Napoleon kept achieving victories with each passing month of his reign, the fragility of his strategic position became ever more revealed even as the bulletins reported more triumphs. Each victory was like the name in a biblical genealogy. Ulm begat Austerlitz. Austerlitz begat Jena. Jena begat Eylau. Eylau begat Friedland. And Friedland, via its cousin Tilsit, begat Spain. And Spain begat a war for which there would be no peace. The French involvement in Spain and Portugal had dated back to

1807. Portuguese reluctance to accept French pressure to join them in Napoleon’s war against the British had led to a French invasion of Portugal in 1807. French involvement in the complex world of Spanish politics and subsequent armed struggles is much too complicated and involved to recall here, but the reader should know that Spanish War of Independence, which started with the Madrid Uprising on May 2, 1808, and the subsequent defeat of Dupont at Bailen in July 1808, led to much escalated French involvement and the personal intervention of Napoleon in November, 1808. Napoleon was victorious in his battles, but could only stay in Spain for a couple of months before events in Central Europe drew him back to Paris in early 1809. Those events in Central Europe were the rise of the Fifth Coalition. Napoleon would never return to Spain, and despite his own personal success, the failure of the French to fully conquer Spain would plague Napoleon till the end of his reign. The situation was accurately described as the “Spanish Ulcer.” The War of the Fifth Coalition would be a reprise of the Franco-Hapsburg wars which had consumed the Austrians during the Revolution and the earlier years of Napoleon’s rule. Three of the previous four Coalition Wars had resulted in the complete defeat of the Austrians and the losses of large swaths of Hapsburg territories. Austrian Emperor Franz I (probably also smarting from his demotion from Holy Roman Emperor to mere Emperor of Austria in the wake of the defeat of the Austrians in 1805) and most of rest of Hapsburg nobility were eager to seek their revenge and the repatriation of both their lands and the leadership of Europe which had been ceded to Napoleon in the wake of his cornucopia of victories.

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