1805: Austerlitz: Napoleon and the Destruction of the Third Coalition

Revealing new study of Napoleon’s greatest victory. Dispels many of the myths surrounding the famous battle of the three emperors. Brought to life with numerous eyewitness accounts. A Main Selection for the History Book Club. The Battle of Austerlitz is almost universally regarded as the most impressive of Napoleon’s many victories. The magnitude of the French achievement against a significantly larger army was unprecedented. In this insightful new study the author analyses the planning of the opposing forces and details the course of the battle hour by hour, describing the fierce see-saw battle around Sokolnitz, the epic struggle for the Pratzen Heights, the dramatic engagement between the legendary Lannes and Bagration in the north, and the widely misunderstood clash of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard and Alexander’s Imperial Leib-Guard. The author has produced a detailed and balanced assessment of the battle that for the first time places familiar French accounts in their proper perspective and exposes many myths regarding the battle that have been perpetuated and even embellished in recent books. With 1805: Austerlitz, the reader is left with a new appreciation of Napoleon and his Grande Army of 1805, an army that decisively defeated not a hapless relic of the ancien regime but rather a formidable professional army that had fought the French armies on equal terms five years earlier. Robert Goetz has been studying the Russian Army of the Napoleonic Wars for the past seven years, an area of specialization that emerged from his longstanding interest in the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. He is the author of several award-winning articles concerning the Russian Army and its campaigns.