Battle of Brienne
The Battle of Brienne (29 January 1814) saw an Imperial French army led by Emperor Napoleon attack Prussian and Russian forces commanded by Prussian Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. After heavy fighting that went on into the night, the French seized the château, nearly capturing Blücher. However, the French were unable to dislodge the Russians from the town of Brienne-le-Château. Napoleon himself, making his first appearance on a battlefield in 1814, was also nearly captured. Very early the next morning, Blücher's troops quietly abandoned the town and retreated to the south, conceding the field to the French. In late December 1813, two Allied armies initially numbering 300,000 men smashed through France's weak defenses and moved west. By late January, Napoleon personally took the field to lead his armies. The French emperor hoped to cripple Blücher's army before it could combine with the main Allied army under Austrian field marshal Karl Philipp, Prince of Schwarzenberg. Napoleon's gamble failed and Blücher escaped to join Schwarzenberg. Three days later, the two Allied armies combined their 120,000 men and attacked Napoleon in the Battle of La Rothière. Prelude Plans In November 1813, the 70,000 French survivors of the disastrous German Campaign of 1813 crossed to the west bank of the Rhine River. Emperor Napoleon left 100,000 French soldiers in German garrisons, trapped by enemy blockading forces and hostile populations. All of Napoleon's German allies switched sides and joined the Sixth Coalition. To the south, Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult's 60,000 men and Marshal Louis Gabriel Suchet's 37,000 defended the Spanish border. Napoleon's step-son Eugène de Beauharnais with 50,000 troops defended the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy against the Austrian Empire. There were numerous French garrisons in Belgium, the Netherlands and eastern France, while 15,000 soldiers were isolated in Mainz. Czar Alexander I of Russia and King Frederick William III of Prussia wished to dethrone Napoleon, but Emperor Francis I of Austria was not anxious to overthrow his son-in-law. Francis also feared that weakening France would strengthen his rivals, Russia and Prussia. Prince Schwarzenberg followed his emperor's wait-and-see policy while Blücher burned to crush Napoleon at the earliest opportunity. Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, the crown prince of Sweden and a former French marshal, led a third Allied army. He secretly wished to replace Napoleon as the leader of France and was not inclined to invade his former homeland. The Allied leaders met at Frankfurt-am-Main to work out a plan to fight Napoleon. In the Allied plan that emerged, Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von Bülow with one of Bernadotte's corps would advance into the Netherlands and be joined there by a British corps under Thomas Graham, 1st Baron Lynedoch. Blücher would cross the middle Rhine with 100,000 troops and occupy Napoleon's attention. Meanwhile, Schwarzenberg with 200,000 men would cross the upper Rhine near Basel and move toward Langres, falling on the French right flank. To oppose this vast array, Napoleon deployed Marshal Claude Perrin Victor with 10,000 troops on the upper Rhine, Marshal Auguste de Marmont with 13,000 and