Question: When did Napoleon achieve his greatest victory?
About the article "Napoleonic Wars", section "War of the Third Coalition 1805".

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After Massena's victory in the Second Battle of Zurich the alliance between Russia and Austria ended.
Despite this it did not end the war and when Napoleon came back from Egypt and proclaimed himself First Consul, the French prospects of victory improved even more.
However, Napoleon needed time in order to bring his troops in Italy so he ordered Massena to hold Nice and Genoa at all costs until he arrived. 
Although the Battle of Borodino can be seen as a victory for Napoleon, some scholars and contemporaries described Borodino as a Pyrrhic victory.
Russian historian Oleg Sokolov agrees that Borodino constituted a Pyrrhic victory for the French, which would ultimately cost Napoleon the war and his crown, although at the time none of this was apparent to either side.
Sokolov adds that the decision to not commit the Guard saved the Russians from an Austerlitz-style defeat and quotes Marshal Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr, one of Napoleon's finest strategists, who analyzed the battle and concluded that an intervention of the Guard would have torn the Russian army to pieces and allowed Napoleon to safely follow his plans to take winter quarters in Moscow and resume his successful campaign in spring or offer the Tsar acceptable peace terms.
Digby Smith calls Borodino 'a draw' but believes that posterity proved Napoleon right in his decision to not commit the Guard so far away from his homeland.
According to Christopher Duffy, the battle of Borodino could be seen as a new Battle of Torgau in the 18th century, when both of the sides sustained terrible losses but neither could achieve their tactical goals, and the battle itself did not have a clear result, even though both sides claimed the battle as their own victory.
However, in a long term war of attrition, the battle was just one more source of losses to the French when they were losing two men to one.
Both the French and the Russians suffered terribly but the Russians had reserve troops, and a clear advantage in the logistics war.
The French Army supplies came over a long road lined with hostile forces.
According to Rhien, so long as the Russian Army existed the French continued to lose.
This victory ultimately cost Napoleon his army, as it allowed the French emperor to believe that the campaign was winnable, exhausting his forces as he went on to Moscow to await a surrender that would never come.
Historian Rhiem notes that the Borodino victory allowed Napoleon to move on to Moscow, where—even allowing for the arrival of reinforcements—the French Army could only possess a maximum of 95,000 men, who would be ill-equipped to win a battle due to a lack of supplies and ammunition.
The "Grande Armée" suffered 66% of its casualties by the time of the Moscow retreat; snow, starvation, and typhus ensured that only 23,000 men crossed the Russian border alive.
Furthermore, while the Russian army suffered heavy casualties in the battle, they had fully recovered by the time of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow; they immediately began to interfere with the French withdrawal, costing Napoleon much of his surviving army. 
Britain gathered together allies to form the Third Coalition against France.
In response, Napoleon seriously considered an invasion of Great Britain, and massed 180,000 effectives at Boulogne.
However, before he could invade, he needed to achieve naval superiority—or at least to pull the British fleet away from the English Channel.
A complex plan to distract the British by threatening their possessions in the West Indies failed when a Franco-Spanish fleet under Admiral Villeneuve turned back after an indecisive action off Cape Finisterre on 22 July 1805.
The Royal Navy blockaded Villeneuve in Cádiz until he left for Naples on 19 October; the British squadron caught and overwhelmingly defeated the combined enemy fleet in the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October (the British commander, Lord Nelson, died in the battle).
Napoleon would never again have the opportunity to challenge the British at sea, nor to threaten an invasion.
He again turned his attention to enemies on the Continent.
The French army left Boulogne and moved towards Austria.
In April 1805, Britain and Russia signed a treaty with the aim of removing the French from the Batavian Republic (roughly present-day Netherlands) and the Swiss Confederation (Switzerland).
Austria joined the alliance after the annexation of Genoa and the proclamation of Napoleon as King of Italy on 17 March 1805.
Sweden, which had already agreed to lease Swedish Pomerania as a military base for British troops against France, formally entered the coalition on 9 August.
The Austrians began the war by invading Bavaria with an army of about 70,000 under Karl Mack von Leiberich, and the French army marched out from Boulogne in late July 1805 to confront them.
At Ulm (25 September – 20 October) Napoleon surrounded Mack's army, forcing its surrender without significant losses.
With the main Austrian army north of the Alps defeated (another army under Archduke Charles manoeuvred inconclusively against André Masséna's French army in Italy), Napoleon occupied Vienna.
Far from his supply lines, he faced a larger Austro-Russian army under the command of Mikhail Kutuzov, with the Emperor Alexander I of Russia personally present.
On 2 December, Napoleon crushed the joint Austro-Russian army in Moravia at Austerlitz (usually considered his greatest victory).
He inflicted a total of 25,000 casualties on a numerically superior enemy army while sustaining fewer than 7,000 in his own force.
Austria signed the Treaty of Pressburg (26 December 1805) and left the Coalition.
The Treaty required the Austrians to give up Venetia to the French-dominated Kingdom of Italy and the Tyrol to Bavaria.
With the withdrawal of Austria from the war, stalemate ensued.
Napoleon's army had a record of continuous unbroken victories on land, but the full force of the Russian army had not yet come into play.
The French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars revolutionized military strategy.
The impact of this period was still to be felt in the American Civil War and the early phases of World War I.
With the advent of cheap small arms and the rise of the drafted citizen soldier, army sizes increased rapidly to become mass forces.
This necessitated dividing the army first into divisions and later into corps.
Along with divisions came divisional artillery; light-weight, mobile cannons with great range and firepower.
Napoleon invariably sought to achieve decision in battle, with the sole aim of utterly destroying his opponent, usually achieving success through superior manoeuvre.
As ruler and general he dealt with the grand strategy as well as the operational strategy, making use of political and economic measures.
While not the originator of the methods he used, Napoleon very effectively combined the relatively superior maneuver and battle stages into one event.
Before this, General Officers had considered this approach to battle as separate events.
However, Napoleon used the maneuver to battle to dictate how and where the battle would progress.
The Battle of Austerlitz was a perfect example of this maneuver.
Napoleon withdrew from a strong position to draw his opponent forward and tempt him into a flank attack, weakening his center.
This allowed the French army to split the allied army and gain victory.
Napoleon used two primary strategies for the approach to battle.
His "Manoeuvre De Derrière" ("move onto the rear") was intended to place the French Army across the enemy's lines of communications.
This forced the opponent to either march to battle with Napoleon or attempt to find an escape route around the army.
By placing his army into the rear, his opponent's supplies and communications would be cut.
This had a negative effect on enemy morale.
Once joined, the battle would be one in which his opponent could not afford defeat.
This also allowed Napoleon to select multiple march routes into a battle site.
Initially, the lack of force concentration helped with foraging for food and sought to confuse the enemy as to his real location and intentions.
This strategy, along with the use of forced marches created a morale bonus that played heavily in his favor.
The "indirect" approach into battle also allowed Napoleon to disrupt the linear formations used by the allied armies.
As the battle progressed, the enemy committed their reserves to stabilize the situation, Napoleon would suddenly release the flanking formation to attack the enemy.
His opponents, being suddenly confronted with a new threat and with little reserves, had no choice but to weaken the area closest to the flanking formation and draw up a battleline at a right angle in an attempt to stop this new threat.
Once this had occurred, Napoleon would mass his reserves at the hinge of that right angle and launch a heavy attack to break the lines.
The rupture in the enemy lines allowed Napoleon's cavalry to flank both lines and roll them up leaving his opponent no choice but to surrender or flee.
The second strategy used by Napoleon I when confronted with two or more enemy armies was the use of the central position.
This allowed Napoleon to drive a wedge to separate the enemy armies.
He would then use part of his force to mask one army while the larger portion overwhelmed and defeated the second army quickly.
He would then march on the second army leaving a portion to pursue the first army and repeat the operations.
This was designed to achieve the highest concentration of men into the primary battle while limiting the enemy's ability to reinforce the critical battle.
The central position had a weakness in that the full power of the pursuit of the enemy could not be achieved because the second army needed attention.
So overall the preferred method of attack was the flank march to cross the enemy's logistics.
Napoleon used the central position strategy during the Battle of Waterloo Napoleon masked Wellington and massed against the Prussian army, and then after the Battle of Ligny was won, Napoleon attempted to do the same to the Allied/British army located just to the south of Waterloo.
His subordinate was unable to mask the defeated Prussian army, who reinforced the Waterloo battle in time to defeat Napoleon and end his domination of Europe.
It can be said that the Prussian Army under Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher used the "maneuver de derrière" against Napoleon who was suddenly placed in a position of reacting to a new enemy threat.
Napoleon's practical strategic triumphs, repeatedly leading smaller forces to defeat larger ones, inspired a whole new field of study into military strategy.
In particular, his opponents were keen to develop a body of knowledge in this area to allow them to counteract a masterful individual with a highly competent group of officers, a General Staff.
The two most significant students of his work were Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian with a background in philosophy, and Antoine-Henri Jomini, who had been one of Napoleon's staff officers.
One notable exception to Napoleon's "strategy of annihilation" and a precursor to trench warfare were the Lines of Torres Vedras during the Peninsular War.
French Armies lived off the land and when they were confronted by a line of fortifications which they could not out flank, they were unable to continue the advance and were forced to retreat once they had consumed all the provisions of the region in front of the lines.
The Peninsular campaign was notable for the development of another method of warfare which went largely unnoticed at the time, but would become far more common in the 20th century.
That was the aid and encouragement the British gave to the Spanish to harass the French behind their lines which led them to squander most of the assets of their Iberian army in protecting the army's line of communications.
This was a very cost effective move for the British, because it cost far less to aid Spanish insurgents than it did to equip and pay regular British army units to engage the same number of French troops.
As the British army could be correspondingly smaller it was able to supply its troops by sea and land without having to live off the land as was the norm at the time.
Further, because they did not have to forage they did not antagonise the locals and so did not have to garrison their lines of communications to the same extent as the French did.
So the strategy of aiding their Spanish civilian allies in their guerrilla or 'small war' benefited the British in many ways, not all of which were immediately obvious. 
The Fifth Coalition (1809) of Britain and Austria against France formed as Britain engaged in the Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal.
Again Britain stood alone, and the sea became the major theatre of war against Napoleon's allies.
During the time of the Fifth Coalition, the Royal Navy won a succession of victories in the French colonies.
On land, the Fifth Coalition attempted few extensive military endeavours.
One, the Walcheren Expedition of 1809, involved a dual effort by the British Army and the Royal Navy to relieve Austrian forces under intense French pressure.
It ended in disaster after the Army commander, John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham, failed to capture the objective, the naval base of French-controlled Antwerp.
For the most part of the years of the Fifth Coalition, British military operations on land (apart from the Iberian Peninsula) remained restricted to hit-and-run operations executed by the Royal Navy, which dominated the sea after having beaten down almost all substantial naval opposition from France and its allies and blockading what remained of France's naval forces in heavily fortified French-controlled ports.
These rapid-attack operations were aimed mostly at destroying blockaded French naval and mercantile shipping and the disruption of French supplies, communications, and military units stationed near the coasts.
Often, when British allies attempted military actions within several dozen miles or so of the sea, the Royal Navy would arrive and would land troops and supplies and aid the Coalition's land forces in a concerted operation.
Royal Navy ships even provided artillery support against French units when fighting strayed near enough to the coastline.
However, the ability and quality of the land forces governed these operations.
For example, when operating with inexperienced guerrilla forces in Spain, the Royal Navy sometimes failed to achieve its objectives simply because of the lack of manpower that the Navy's guerrilla allies had promised to supply.
Economic warfare continued: the French Continental System against the British naval blockade of French-controlled territory.
Due to military shortages and lack of organisation in French territory, many breaches of the Continental System occurred as French-dominated states tolerated or even encouraged trade with British smugglers.
Both sides entered additional conflicts in attempts to enforce their blockade; the British fought the United States in the War of 1812 (1812–15), and the French engaged in the Peninsular War (1808–14).
The Iberian conflict began when Portugal continued trade with Britain despite French restrictions.
When Spain failed to maintain the continental system, the uneasy Spanish alliance with France ended in all but name.
French troops gradually encroached on Spanish territory until they occupied Madrid, and installed a client monarchy.
This provoked an explosion of popular rebellions across Spain.
Heavy British involvement soon followed.
Austria, previously an ally of France, took the opportunity to attempt to restore its imperial territories in Germany as held prior to Austerlitz.
Austria achieved a number of initial victories against the thinly spread army of Marshal Berthier.
Napoleon had left Berthier with only 170,000 men to defend France's entire eastern frontier (in the 1790s, 800,000 men had carried out the same task, but holding a much shorter front).
After defeats in Spain suffered by France, Napoleon took charge and enjoyed success, retaking Madrid, defeating the Spanish and forcing a withdrawal of the heavily out-numbered British army from the Iberian Peninsula (Battle of Corunna, 16 January 1809).
But when he left, the guerrilla war against his forces in the countryside continued to tie down great numbers of troops.
Austria's attack prevented Napoleon from successfully wrapping up operations against British forces by necessitating his departure for Austria, and he never returned to the Peninsular theatre.
The British then sent in a fresh army under Sir Arthur Wellesley (later called the Duke of Wellington) whom the French could not stop.
The Peninsular war proved a major disaster for France.
Napoleon did well in when he was in direct charge, but that followed severe losses, and was followed by worse losses.
He severely underestimated how much manpower would be needed.
Spain proved to be a major, long-term drain on money, manpower and prestige.
Historian David Gates called it the "Spanish ulcer."
France lost the Peninsular War; Napoleon realized it had been a disaster for his cause, writing later, "That unfortunate war destroyed me ... All the circumstances of my disasters are bound up in that fatal knot.
"Meanwhile the Austrians drove into the Duchy of Warsaw, but suffered defeat at the Battle of Raszyn on 19 April 1809.
The Polish army captured West Galicia following its earlier success.
Napoleon assumed personal command in the east and bolstered the army there for his counter-attack on Austria.
After a few small battles, the well-run campaign forced the Austrians to withdraw from Bavaria, and Napoleon advanced into Austria.
His hurried attempt to cross the Danube resulted in the massive Battle of Aspern-Essling (22 May 1809) — Napoleon's first significant tactical defeat.
But the Austrian commander, Archduke Charles, failed to follow up on his indecisive victory, allowing Napoleon to prepare and seize Vienna in early July.
He defeated the Austrians at Wagram, on 5–6 July.
(It was during the middle of that battle that Marshal Bernadotte was stripped of his command after retreating contrary to Napoleon's orders.
Shortly thereafter, Bernadotte took up the offer from Sweden to fill the vacant position of Crown Prince there.
Later he would actively participate in wars against his former Emperor.
)The War of the Fifth Coalition ended with the Treaty of Schönbrunn (14 October 1809).
In the east, only the Tyrolese rebels led by Andreas Hofer continued to fight the French-Bavarian army until finally defeated in November 1809, while in the west the Peninsular War continued.
In 1810, the French Empire reached its greatest extent.
On the continent, the British and Portuguese remained restricted to the area around Lisbon (behind their impregnable lines of Torres Vedras) and to besieged Cadiz.
Napoleon married Marie-Louise, an Austrian Archduchess, with the aim of ensuring a more stable alliance with Austria and of providing the Emperor with an heir (something his first wife, Josephine, had failed to do).
As well as the French Empire, Napoleon controlled the Swiss Confederation, the Confederation of the Rhine, the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Italy.
Territories allied with the French included:  the Kingdom of Spain (under Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's elder brother)  the Kingdom of Westphalia (Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon's younger brother)  the Kingdom of Naples (under Joachim Murat, husband of Napoleon's sister Caroline)  the Principality of Lucca and Piombino (under Elisa Bonaparte (Napoleon's sister) and her husband Felice Baciocchi); and Napoleon's former enemies, Prussia and Austria.