Friedrich Freiherr (Baron) von Hotze (20 April 1739 – 25 September 1799), was a Swiss-born general and Field Marshall- Lieutenant in the Austrian army during the French Revolutionary Wars.

Germany & Austria, Directories of Military and Marine Officers, 1500-1939 Hotze was born on 20 April 1739 in Richterswil in the Canton of Zürich, in the Old Swiss Confederacy (present-day Switzerland).

His persistent attentiveness to Joseph II garnered for him a commission in the Austrian imperial army, and he served in the brief War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–79).

On the return journey, he stopped in Vienna, to present himself to the Emperor, Joseph II, and to seek an appointment as a major in the imperial Austrian army.

In 1790, Leopold succeeded his brother Joseph as emperor and by 1791, he considered the situation surrounding his sister, Marie Antoinette, and her children, with greater alarm.

From their base in Koblenz, adjacent to the French-German border, they sought direct support for military intervention from the royal houses of Europe, and raised an army.

In this War of the First Coalition (1792–1798), France ranged itself against most of the European states sharing land or water borders with her, plus Portugal and the Ottoman Empire.

[8] In April 1792, Hotze and his regiment joined the autonomous Austrian Corps under Paul Anton II, Count von Esterházy in the Breisgau[9] although they took no part in any military clashes.

As commander of the third column, he played an essential role the storming of the line at Wissembourg and Lauterburg, for which he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa.

[11] In the Battle of Neresheim (11 August 1796), Hotze commanded 13 battalions and 28 cavalry squadrons, a total of 13,300 men, and formed the center of Archduke Charles' line.

The primary combatants of the First Coalition, France and Austria, were highly suspicious of each other's motives, and the Congress quickly derailed in a mire of intrigue and diplomatic posturing.

Although Charles was unhappy with the strategy set forward by his brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, he had acquiesced to the less ambitious plan to which Francis and his advisers, the Aulic Council, had agreed: Austria would fight a defensive war and would maintain a continuous defensive line from the southern bank of the Danube, across the Swiss Cantons and into northern Italy.

[19] Instructed to block the Austrians from access to the Swiss alpine passes, Jourdan planned to isolate the armies of the Coalition in Germany from allies in northern Italy, and prevent them from assisting one another.

By crossing the Rhine in early March, Jourdan acted before the Charles' army could be reinforced by Austria's Russian allies, who had agreed to send 60,000 seasoned soldiers and their more-seasoned commander, Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov.

Furthermore, if the French held the interior passes in Switzerland, they could not only prevent the Austrians from transferring troops between northern Italy and southwestern Germany, but could use the routes to move their own forces between the two theaters.

[21] At the same time, the Army of Switzerland, under command of André Masséna, pushed toward the Grisons, intending to cut the Austrian lines of communication and relief at the mountain passes by Luziensteig and Feldkirch.

After fortifying Feldkirch, he overwhelmed the fortress at St. Luzisteig, an important pass (elevation: 713 metres (2,339 ft)) in the Canton of Graubünden that links Swiss Confederation and Liechtenstein.

Hotze took 10,000 of the 15,500 troops designated for the defense of the Vorarlberg toward Lake Constance, intending to support Archduke Charles' left wing at the battles of Ostrach and, a few days later Stockach.

[24] In his absence, Jellacic's 5,500 men faced 12,000 under the command of generals of division Jean-Joseph Dessolles and Claude Lecourbe, inflicting enormous casualties (3000) on the French while suffering minimal losses (900) of their own.

[25] By mid-May 1799, the Austrians had wrested control of Switzerland from the French as the forces of Hotze and Count Heinrich von Bellegarde pushed them out of the Grisons; after pushing Jean-Baptiste Jourdan's force, the Army of the Danube, back to the Rhine, Archduke Charles' own sizable force—about 110,000 strong—crossed the Rhine, and prepared to join with the armies of Hotze and Bellegarde on the plains by Zürich.

[4] Once the union took place in the first two days of June, Archduke Charles, supported by Hotze's command, attacked French positions at Zürich.

[26] In first Battle of Zürich, on 4–7 June 1799, Hotze commanded the entire left wing of Archduke Charles' army, which included 20 battalions of infantry, plus support artillery, and 27 squadrons of cavalry, in total, 19,000 men.

[28] While Charles could see this to be unreasonable—Alexander Suvorov had not yet reached central Switzerland, and it was folly to think that Alexander Korsakov's force of 30,000 and Hotze's 20,000 could hold all of the region until the arrival of the rest of the Russian force—the order was emphatic.

[35] When Suvorov cleared the mountains, he had nowhere to go; he was forced to withdraw in another arduous march into the Vorarlberg, where his starving and ragged army arrived in late October.

Between Korsakov's inability to hold the French at Zürich, and Hotze's death at Schänis, the Swiss campaign degenerated to an utter shambles.