page_title: Battle of Schliengen
section_title: Terrain
hierarchical_section_title: Battle of Schliengen / Terrain
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Die Karte zeigt den Fluss Rhein English: The map shows the river Rhine
context_page_description: At the Battle of Schliengen, the French Army of the Rhine and Moselle under the command of Jean-Victor Moreau and the Austrian army under the command of Archduke Charles of Austria both claimed victories. The village of Schliengen lies in the present-day Kreis Lörrach close to the border of present-day Baden-Württemberg, the Haut-Rhin, and the Canton of Basel-Stadt.
  During the French Revolutionary Wars, Schliengen was a strategically important location for the armies of both Republican France and Habsburg Austria. Control of the area gave either combatant access to southwestern German states and important Rhine crossings. On 20 October Moreau retreated from Freiburg im Breisgau and established his army along a ridge of hills. The severe condition of the roads prevented Archduke Charles from flanking the French right wing. The French left wing lay too close to the Rhine to outflank, and the French center, positioned in a 7-mile semi-circle on heights that commanded the terrain below, was unassailable. Instead, he attacked the French flanks directly, and in force, which increased casualties for both sides.
context_section_description: The Rhine River flows west along the border between the German states and the Swiss Cantons. The High Rhine (Hochrhein), the 80-mile (130 km) stretch between the Rhine Falls near Schaffhausen and Basel, cuts through steep hillsides over a gravel bed; in such places as the former rapids at Laufenburg, it moves in torrents. A few miles north and east of Basel, the terrain flattens. The Rhine makes a wide, northerly turn, in what is called the Rhine knee, and enters the so-called Rhine ditch (Rheingraben), part of a rift valley bordered by the Black Forest on the east and Vosges mountains on the west. In 1796, the plain on both sides of the river, some 19 miles (31 km) wide, was dotted with villages and farms. At the farthest edges of the flood plain, especially on the eastern side, the old mountains created dark shadows on the horizon. Tributaries cut through the hilly terrain of the Black Forest, creating deep defiles in the mountains. The tributaries then wound in rivulets through the flood plain to the river.
  The landscape was impressive, but rugged. As a nineteenth-century traveler described it,
  the mountains in the vicinity [of Müllheim] are bold; the dark ravines contrasting with its sunny fronts offer some exquisite scenes. The Rhine ... lay revealed before us for many a league, twisting and twining like a serpent of silver ... dotted with innumerable islands, and flowing through a most extensive plain, perfectly flat. Our elevation was considerable and the eye ranged over a great extent of country: Elsace  [sic], in France, and the level country as far as Bingen, would have been seen to their furthest limits had not the distance melted the extreme verges into 'thin air'. Many were the villages, and hamlets, and woods sprinkled over the landscape. [...] 
   The traveler described additional walks, in which the forest of dark pine bordered directly on the road, "checquered [sic] by glades in which browsed sheep and goats."
  The Rhine River itself looked different in the 1790s than it does today; the passage from Basel to Iffezheim was "corrected" (straightened) between 1817 and 1875. Between 1927 and 1975, a canal was constructed to control the water level. In 1790, though, the river was wild and unpredictable, in some places four times wider or more than it is in the twenty-first century, even under regular water levels. Its channels wound through marsh and meadow, and created islands of trees and vegetation that were periodically submerged by floods.
caption: The Rhine River prevented easy escape into France.
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