A British PhD about Austria!
I came across this interesting PhD: Fighting for the Habsburgs: Community, Patriotism and the kaiserlich-königliche Armee, 1788-1816 by Kurt J. G. Baird PhD of the University of York from 2022, which will be published in early 2027 as an academic book, so it is priced at £50. However, it is currently available for free on the Net at https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/31909/1/Baird_204038989_ThesisClean.pdf
After the recent thesis by Gramm on “the unfortunate General Mack” (in German) at https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/api/object/o:1249109/download , which also contains a lot of useful background political material, it is good to see increased interest in the Imperial Austrian army, especially in English. The book will include uniform plates, but also some of another set created in 1801, which illustrated various heroic acts during the Second Coalition.
The work of Ilya Berkowich and Michael Wenzel in the Vienna Kriegsarchivs, alongside printed material from a century ago, has produced a collection of statistical material, which enables a better understanding of the composition of the army. I had mentioned the 54,000 Galicians (Poles and Ukrainians from the Partitions of Poland) serving in the army in 1802, which represented nearly a fifth of its strength, but hadn’t appreciated their impact on the army. The figure probably means around 100,000 recruits in all across the Revolutionary Wars with an average of about 500 per infantry regiment at any time, although this figure could reach nearly 1,000. As Baird says, this was a huge supply of manpower, which may have been what kept Austria going against the hordes of the French levee en masse. At the start of the wars, up to a third of the infantry regiments comprised Auslaender (foreigners - mostly south Germans with the usual mix of Irish adventurers). This figure steadily declines, especially after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, so it is at the heart of Baird’s thesis that conscription was falling more on the districts of the western and northern parts of the empire, which meant local communities were bound more closely to the war effort and thus the Habsburg monarch. It is just a shame that Baird seems to lack some basic knowledge of the army (a Cameradschaft was led by a Gefreiter, not a Korporal). He has also run a spellcheck, but didn’t check some of the replacement words - hopefully the publishers will handle that!).
However, we are now hearing about what motivated and bound together Austrian troops. It is a subject that has not really been addressed in comparison with the overly patriotic mountains of French material and the nonsense of Sharpe’s British special forces. While Baird has introduced interesting material on how local communities increasingly back their conscripted men, there is rather less material on Hungary, which was always well below its capability in supplying troops, but then the material harder for linguistic reasons. He is also good on the propaganda efforts of the Imperial giver especially from 1808, although I think he has rather fallen for some of the jingoistic material written about the Wars of Liberation, when it is easier to recruit when you’re winning.
This thesis reminded me of writing the two Warriors for Osprey on the Austrian Infantry and Hungarian Hussars, where you introduce and discuss a topic, add in some contemporary quotes and draw a conclusion . So, I was a bit surprised to see he didn’t refer to my Ospreys nor nearly all the sources quoted in them (aside from two famous cavalry memoirs). It looks like the academic snobbery directed at Osprey and the specialist amateurs writing books for the smaller publishers continues to the detriment of expanding the subject and its popularity. Nevertheless, it is great to see various authors looking at the subject and bringing their own interpretations.