Battle of Maudach

Initially, the rulers of Europe viewed the French Revolution as an internal dispute between the French king and his subjects. As revolutionary rhetoric grew more strident, the European monarchs declared that their interests were the same as Louis XVI and his family; the 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 and compounding their problems in international relations, French émigrés continued to agitate for support of a counter-revolution. On 20 April 1792, the French National Convention declared war on Austria, beginning the War of the First Coalition (1792–98). France ranged itself against most of the European states sharing land or water borders, plus Portugal and the Ottoman Empire.[1] Despite some victories in 1792, by early 1793 French forces had been pushed out of Belgium, there was an internal revolt in the Vendée over conscription, wide-spread public 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.[2] 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)).[1]

Map of Rhine River shows Düsseldorf and the Sieg and Lahn Rivers in the north and Strasbourg and Mannheim in the south. The colors different sections of the Rhine River: blue is the Alp Rhine and the Lake Rhine (where the river runs through Lake Constance); turquoise indicates the High Rhine (which runs east to west through of Lake Constance); The Upper Rhine (green) begins where the river takes a sharp turn at the Rhine Knee, and flows south to north; yellow designates the Middle Rhine (sometimes called Mittelrhein) and orange designates the Low Rhine, where the Rhine passes into the Netherlands and reaches the North Sea.

Louis Desaix, commanding the left (northern) column of the Army of the Rhine and Moselle, had about 27,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry when he crossed the Rhine at Maudach. He faced Petrasch's division of about a third of the size, including mixed troops of infantry and dragoons.[3]

While Desaix crossed at Maudauch, Jourdan's main body crossed the Rhine on 10 June at Neuwied to join Kléber and the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse advanced to the Lahn river.[3] In the south, Maximilian Anton Karl, Count Baillet de Latour took command of the Army of the Upper Rhine in place of Wurmser.[7] Leaving 12,000 troops to guard Mannheim, Charles distributeded his remaining troops among his two armies and swiftly moved north against Jourdan. The Archduke defeated the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse at the Battle of Wetzlar on 15 June 1796 and Jourdan lost no time in recrossing the Rhine at Neuwied.[7][8]

The action at Maudach was part of a three-pronged feint at the Coalition's defenses in the middle Rhine. On 15 June, Desaix's 30,000-man command mauled Franz Petrasch's 11,000 Austrians at Maudach. The French suffered 600 casualties and the Austrians suffered three times as many.[6] The Austrians clashed with Kléber's divisions at Uckerath, inflicting 3,000 casualties on the French for only 600 casualties. Charles left 35,000 men with Wartensleben, 30,000 more in Mainz and the other fortresses along the Rhine and moved south with 20,000 troops to help Latour across from Speyer and Kléber withdrew within the Düsseldorf defenses.[8] After another feint at the Austrian positions near Mannheim, Moreau sent his army south from Speyer on a forced march toward Strasbourg; Desaix crossed the Rhine at Kehl near Strasbourg on the night of 23–24 June.[7]

On 24 June, at Kehl, Moreau's advance guard of 10,000 men preceded the main force of 27,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry directed at the Swabian pickets on the bridge.[6] The Swabians were hopelessly outnumbered and could not be reinforced. Most of the Imperial Army of the Rhine was stationed further north, by Mannheim, where the river was easier to cross but too far away to support the smaller force at Kehl. Neither the Condé's troops in Freiburg nor Karl Aloys zu Fürstenberg's force in Rastatt could reach Kehl in time to support them.[9] Within a day, Moreau had four divisions across the river and thrust out of Kehl, the Swabian contingent reformed at Rastatt by 5 July and managed to hold the city until the French turned both flanks. Charles could not move much of his army away from Mannheim or Karlsruhe, where the French had also crossed the river and Fürstenberg could not hold the southern flank. At Hüningen near Basel, on the same day that Moreau's advance guard crossed at Kehl, Ferino executed a full crossing and advanced unopposed eastwards along the German shore of the Rhine with the 16th and 50th Demi-brigades, the 68th, 50th and 68th line infantry and six squadrons of cavalry that included the 3rd and 7th Hussars and the 10th Dragoons.[10]