page_title: Battle of Wattignies
section_title: Commentary
hierarchical_section_title: Battle of Wattignies / Commentary
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of the French politician, engineer, and mathematician.
context_page_description: The Battle of Wattignies saw a Republican French army commanded by Jean-Baptiste Jourdan attack a Coalition army directed by Prince Josias of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. After two days of combat Jourdan's troops compelled the Habsburg covering force led by François Sébastien Charles Joseph de Croix, Count of Clerfayt to withdraw. The War of the First Coalition victory allowed the French to raise the Siege of Maubeuge. At a time when failed generals were often executed or imprisoned, Jourdan had to endure interference from Lazare Carnot from the Committee of Public Safety. The village, renamed Wattignies-la-Victoire in honor of the important success, is located 9 kilometres southeast of Maubeuge.
  Coburg's main army encircled 25,000 French soldiers in Maubeuge while about 22,000 Austrians under Clerfayt were formed in a semi-circle, covering the southern approaches to the fortress. On the first day, 45,000 French soldiers mounted a clumsy attack which was easily repulsed, except near the village of Wattignies. On the second day, Jourdan concentrated half his army at Wattignies and after a tough fight, forced Coburg to concede defeat.
context_section_description: The Carnot version of history is evident in the Encyclopædia Britannica (1911) account:
  Jourdan wished to renew the left attack, but Carnot, the engineer, considered the Wattignies plateau the key of the position and his opinion prevailed. In the night the nearly equal partition of force, which was largely responsible for the failure, was modified, and the strength of the attack massed opposite Wattignies.
  Historian Michael Glover presented Carnot as a meddler and wrote of the politically powerful Committee of Public Safety member,
  Carnot's talents as 'the organizer of victory' are beyond dispute, but his tactical skills were minimal, a defect he concealed by a careful rewriting of history. To drive away a poorly led covering force of 20,000 with the 45,000 available to the Army of the North should have posed no great problem, but the business was sadly bungled. Carnot insisted that there should be a double encircling movement, a favorite maneuver of his, combined with a frontal attack, thus carefully dispersing the French numerical superiority.
  Carnot believed that General Duquesnoy was capable but recognized that Balland and Fromentin were not very good generals and had no use at all for Cordellier. Phipps pointed out that none of Jourdan's division commanders fought under Napoleon. Jourdan later noted that Coburg erred by placing the Army of Observation too close to Maubeuge. He asserted that if Coburg had defended Avesnes-sur-Helpe, the relief army would have been in difficulty. He thought that Benjowsky's force should have been posted at Obrechies. A British observer, Harry Calvert credited the powerful French artillery for the victory. Louis Alexandre Andrault de Langeron, a French Royalist who emigrated to the Russian Empire attributed the Coalition failure to the Dunkirk expedition that split the army, the retreat from Maubeuge, chronic slowness and the "disastrous system of forming a cordon, which causes one to be weak everywhere".
  Phipps summed up the failure of the Coalition with a cricket analogy.
  The Allies totally failed to see that the best way to defend the length of the frontier was to concentrate and to crush Jourdan, and although they were well informed about his collecting troops at Guise, they allowed him to bring up slowly superior forces against one link of their long chain, as if their posts were so many players, each bound to defend his own wicket.
caption: Lazare Carnot
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