Spanish regular armies including those led by General Joaquín Blake continued to fight and guerrilla activity in the countryside made French operations hazardous.

[39] Austria hoped Prussia would assist them in a war with France but a letter from Prussian minister Baron von Stein discussing the negotiations was intercepted by French agents and published in the Le Moniteur Universel on 8 September.

[40] On the same day that Stein was compromised the Convention of Paris agreed a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Prussia, where French garrisons had been in place since the end of the War of the Fourth Coalition.

[35][41] Despite this setback Stadion hoped Prussia would change their mind and that an Austrian advance into the French-controlled Confederation of the Rhine in Germany would lead to popular uprisings that would distract the French.

[32] The French army mostly consisted of veterans of Napoleon's earlier campaigns, though recent conscripts formed large parts of some units, negatively affecting their fighting ability.

He returned to Paris from his campaigns in Spain in winter 1808–09 and instructed the main French field commander in southern Germany, Louis Alexandre Berthier, on planned deployments and concentrations for this likely new second front.

[59] On 30 March, he wrote a letter to Berthier explaining his intention to mass 140,000 troops in the vicinity of Regensburg (Ratisbon), far to the north of where the Austrians were planning to make their attack.

Berthier focussed on an ambiguous sentence that called for Davout to station his III Corps around Regensburg "whatever happens"; it is likely that Napoleon intended this to apply only if the Austrians attacked after 15 April.

When Napoleon realised that many of the Austrian forces had crossed the Isar and were marching towards the Danube, he insisted that the entire French army deploy behind the Ilm River in a bataillon carré in 48 hours.

[72] On 22 April, Charles left 40,000 troops under Rosenberg and Hohenzollern to attack Davout and Lefebvre while detaching two corps under Kollowrat and Lichtenstein to march for Abbach and gain undisputed control of the river bank.

Davout ordered an attack along the entire line despite numerical inferiority; the 10th Light Infantry Regiment successfully stormed the village of Leuchling and captured the woods of Unter-Leuchling with heavy casualties.

Lacking time for a siege, Napoleon ordered Marshal Jean Lannes to storm the walls, succeeding at his second attempt and capturing the town by 5:00 pm in the Battle of Ratisbon.

Napoleon did not expect to encounter opposition, and the bridges linking the French troops at Aspern-Essling to Lobau were not protected with palisades, making them vulnerable to Austrian barges that had been set ablaze.

[87] Immediate resistance to the French advance was restricted to the outpost divisions of Nordmann and Johann von Klenau; the main Habsburg army was stationed five miles (8 km) away, centered on the village of Wagram.

[88] Napoleon ordered a general advance at noon on 5 July; an early attack by Masséna on the left flank captured Leopold and Süssenbrunn but the French were held off elsewhere by a strong Austrian defence.

After difficult fighting in the first phase, Masséna sent in Molitor's reserve division, which slowly captured Aderklaa back for the French, only to lose it again following fierce Austrian bombardments and counterattacks.

The Austrians defended against several bungled French assaults at the Battle of Sacile in April, causing Eugène to fall back on Verona and the Adige river.

[106] The Royal Navy's patrols into the Western Scheldt and a dockyard strike at Antwerp alerted the French to the area's vulnerability and efforts were made to improve the defences and reinforce its garrisons.

[2][104] The expedition was not capable of landing sufficient troops on the southern side of the Western Scheldt to capture the reinforced garrison at Cadzand due to a lack of boats.

[119] A storm in February scattered Gambier's fleet and allowed the French, under Jean-Baptiste Philibert Willaumez, to put to sea and move to anchor in the Basque Roads.

Gambier failed to capitalise on the situation by sending in the main British fleet, though Cochrane's smaller force destroyed a number of vessels over the following days.

[129] Hofer freed the Tyrol of Bavarian occupation by late August but on 29 September an Italian force under Luigi Gaspare Peyri captured Trento, though they could advance no further.

His force of a few thousand volunteer Brunswickers fought alongside Austrian troops under General Kienmayer in Saxony, a French client state led by Frederick Augustus I.

After taking the Saxon capital, Dresden, and pushing back an army under the command of Napoleon's brother, Jérôme Bonaparte, the Austrians were effectively in control of all of Saxony.

[133] The Duke of Brunswick refused to be bound by the armistice and led his corps on a fighting march right across Germany to the mouth of the River Weser, from where they sailed to England and entered British service.

Emperor Francis agreed to pay an indemnity equivalent to almost 85 million francs, gave recognition to Napoleon's brother Joseph as the King of Spain, and reaffirmed the exclusion of British trade from his remaining dominions.

Just a few days before the conclusion of the Treaty of Schönbrunn, an 18-year-old German named Friedrich Staps approached Napoleon during an army review and attempted to stab the emperor, but he was intercepted by General Rapp.

[140] In 1813, during the War of the Sixth Coalition, there were anti-French risings and spontaneous guerrilla activity, though whether this was fuelled by pan-German nationalism or patriotism for the old order is debated by historians; a united Germany did not come about until 1871.

[142] The decline in the tactical skill of the French infantry led to increasingly heavy columns of foot soldiers eschewing manoeuvres and relying on sheer weight of numbers to break through, a development best emphasized by MacDonald's attack at Wagram.

Although Napoleon's manoeuvers were successful, as evidenced by overturning the awful initial French position, the growing size of his armies made military strategies more difficult to manage.