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Updated: June 19, 2025
It had lost its general, Joubert, killed at the battle of Novi, while leading a charge on the Austro-Russians. But this frontier, which was at a distance from the centre of action, despite the defeat of Novi, was not crossed, and Championnet ably defended it.
In the midst of it the French general Masséna, commanding in Switzerland, the centre of the great hostile front which extended from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, made a vehement and sustained attack upon the Austro-Russians at Zurich, on the 25th of September. Gaining a complete victory, he drove the enemy back beyond the point where Suwarrow expected to make his junction.
"It was this battle," writes Admiral de la Gravière, "which for two years delivered over the Mediterranean to the British and called thither the squadrons of Russia, which shut up our army in the midst of a hostile people and led the Porte to declare against us, which put India beyond our reach and thrust France to the brink of ruin, for it rekindled the hardly extinct war with Austria and brought Suvaroff and the Austro-Russians to our very frontiers."
Moreau had defeated Souvarow at Bassignano; Brune had defeated the Duke of York and General Hermann at Bergen; Massena had annihilated the Austro-Russians at Zurich; Korsakof had escaped only with the greatest difficulty; the Austrian, Hotz, with three other generals, were killed, and five made prisoners. Massena saved France at Zurich, as Villars, ninety years earlier, had saved it at Denain.
The number of combatants at the Emperor's disposal in this battle was sixty-eight thousand men. The Austro-Russians had ninety-two thousand. Our losses in killed and wounded were about eight thousand, the enemy stated that their losses in killed wounded and drowned amounted to fourteen thousand.
The details of those bloody campaigns by which Holland and Belgium were for a moment rescued from the grasp of the Republic; Jourdan beaten beyond the Rhine by the Archduke Charles; and the north of Italy, the whole of Buonaparte's mighty conquests, recovered by the Austro-Russians under Suwarrow; as also of the ultimate reverses of the allies in the direction of Holland, of the concentration of their forces in two great armies, one on the frontier of Switzerland, and another lower down on the Rhine, for the purpose of carrying the war by two inlets into the heart of France and finally, of the masterly retreat of Macdonald, by which he succeeded in leading the army which had occupied Naples quite through Italy into Provence; all these details belong rather to the general history of the period, than to the biography of Buonaparte.
In Upper Italy their armies were in full retreat, having been forced back from the Adige to the Adda, whence an urgent message was sent to Macdonald, Championnet's successor at Naples, to fall back to the northward and effect a junction with the main body, soon to be sorely pressed by an overwhelming force of the Austro-Russians, at whose head was the famous Suwarrow.
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