Suvorov's Swiss campaign took place on Swiss territory between September and October 1799 during the War of the Second Coalition. Russo-Austrian troops, who had already repeatedly defeated the French in Italy between April and August, crossed St. Gotthard under the command of Field Marshal Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov-Rymniksky, with orders to march against General André Masséna to drive him out of the Helvetic Republic. The campaign was an instance of mountain warfare.
After the important victories of the previous months during the campaign in Italy, Suvorov had remained in control of the situation in the northern part of the Peninsula and a final defeat of the French seemed imminent with the Russian general determined to march even to France, but the divisions and rivalries of the coalesced powers would soon favor the resurgence of the revolutionary armies: fearing that Russia's influence would become too great, the Allies, also leveraging Tsar Paul I's ambitions to present himself as the liberator of Switzerland, succeeded in getting Russian troops to halt their operations in Italy and be redeployed to the Confederation, leaving the initiative in the Peninsula to the Austrians. Suvorov was then ordered to head north with his army and march across St. Gotthard to join the Russian troops that had just been led across the Limmat by General Alexander Mikhailovich Rimsky-Korsakov.
Marshal Suvorov took St. Gotthard after fierce battles and then marched laboriously along the Reuss River valley, constantly opposed by General Claude Lecourbe. When he reached Altdorf he was forced to detour northeast through the mountains, as the French firmly controlled Lake Lucerne and the passes to the west. General Masséna then sent the divisions of Generals Honoré Gazan and Édouard Mortier, coordinated by General Jean-de-Dieu Soult, to block the Russian advance between Schwyz and Glarus; Suvorov then headed for the Linth, having achieved some success and captured Glarus, one of the main goals; although his soldiers under Bagration's tactical control came to a stalemate at Näfels against General Gabriel Molitor's soldiers. The village of Näfels changed hands up to six times.
Marshal Suvorov's situation, isolated in the mountains, with scarce supplies and opposed on all fronts by French troops, became increasingly difficult; after learning of the defeat of Generals Korsakov and Hotze in the Second Battle of Zurich and the Battle of Linth River, he had no choice but to attempt to retreat eastward for the purpose of rescuing the remnants of his now heavily strained army. The retreat of the Russians was very difficult and cost new heavy losses, while all artillery was lost; finally, via the Panix Pass, the Russians reached the Rhine at Glion (or Ilanz) on October 7 and then continued on to Vorarlberg, where they joined General Korsakov's survivors. Suvorov was recalled to St. Petersburg, where he again fell out of favor with the tsarist court: Paul I refused to receive him in audience and, injured and ill, the elderly general died after a few weeks in the capital on May 18, 1800. Masséna would later confess that he would exchange all his victories for Suvorov's passage of the Alps.
Political and military background
Between the end of April and mid-August 1799, Field Marshal Aleksandr Vasilyevich Suvorov had routed French revolutionary troops in northern Italy, caused the collapse of the sister republics in the Peninsula, and taken de facto control of Lombardy and Piedmont. Thanks to his brilliant victories, he had received from the tsar the title of "Prince of Italy" (Knjaz Italijski - Russian: Князь Италийский, hence the nickname Italiskij, "the Italic") and was now close to finally crushing the last French resistance in Piedmont and then invading the Ligurian Riviera; Suvorov had also declared himself ready to even march to Paris as he had promised General Jean Mathieu Philibert Sérurier before releasing him.
The divisions and rivalries among the coalesced powers, Kingdom of Great Britain, Holy Roman Empire, and Russian Empire, however, did not allow them to take advantage of the victories in Italy, favoring instead soon the recovery of the forces of the First French Republic: the British were afraid that Russian influence in Italy would become too great and that Tsarist power would overlook the Mediterranean ports dangerously; the Austrians saw the Russian successes and the Tsar's meddling as a real threat to their supremacy in northern Italy, to the extent that they preferred to lose Russian military support in Piedmont rather than the political advantage that would come to them at the peace table, when they would present themselves as the sole occupants of the Savoy state from which, moreover, they could easily enter France alone with their own army. The British government, worried that Republican France might use the powerful Dutch fleet to threaten the British Isles directly, had then prepared new war plans that included redeploying the Russian army to Switzerland to facilitate the landing of an Anglo-Russian coalition in the Batavian Republic.
Although in theory Suvorov answered directly to the tsar, the Austrian court council and Chancellor Thugut ordered him to abandon Italy and move toward Switzerland, where his army was to join a second Russian contingent under the command of General Aleksandr Mikhailovich Rimsky-Korsakov, arriving with 30,000 men from Galicia. General Michael von Melas's Austrian army was to garrison Piedmont and seize Cuneo; at the same time Archduke Charles was to move from Switzerland to Germany along the Rhine so that Austria would also have a chance to oust the Elector of Bavaria Maximilian I.
Suvorov would have liked Archduke Charles to await his arrival before moving, so as to give Korsakov ease in organizing himself and resisting the overwhelming French forces, but the archduke was an all too faithful executor of the orders of the courtly council and immediately left the strong position in Zurich: the French quickly occupied it and Korsakov was doomed to certain defeat. Suvorov's remonstrances were futile:
The position in Zurich, which was to be defended by 60000 Austrians, had been abandoned to 20000 Russians (...)
— Letter to Archduke Charles - from the Summary of Suvorov's Campaign in Switzerland by Count Vénanson
Suvorov's last holdouts, who had called Chancellor Thugut "out of his mind" for the strategy imposed, were swept away on August 25 by a letter from the Austrian emperor, peremptorily ordering him to abandon plans to attack the French in Genoa and immediately cross the Alps to launch an offensive against France from Switzerland. Beyond the decisions of what Carl von Clausewitz later termed a "narrow-minded policy" on the part of the British and Austrians, aimed simply at avoiding an inconvenient Russian presence in Italy and the Mediterranean and meeting special needs, modern historiography has seen clear military advantages in these plans.
After the Austrian cession of Belgium to France by the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797, and the vast German territory separating them, the two ancient rival powers had but the Italian battlefields to come into direct contact and confront each other militarily; to secure strategic control of them it was necessary to secure dominance of the Alpine ranges: Austria possessed a large part of the Alpine chain, and from Tyrol could bring down numerous battalions unhindered into the extensive plains washed by the Po; in contrast, France did not initially have this obvious and coveted advantage. The major obstacle was Switzerland, which stretched from the Tyrolean Alps to the borders of France, and prevented access from the Alps for much of the range: it was therefore of paramount interest to the French Republic, if it wished to continue the war with Austria, to retain possession of the Swiss Plateau obtained in February 1798 with the invasion led by General Guillaume Marie-Anne Brune.
This provided the revolutionaries with two strategic outlets: one allowed them to bypass the Black Forest and easily sweep into the upper Danube, and the other to descend through the Alpine passes of Valais and reach northern Italy directly; once war broke out again, it therefore became of enormous tactical and strategic importance for the Austrians to drive the French out of Switzerland. For their part, the British considered Switzerland to be the ideal territory from which to launch an invasion of France, and finally, the Austrians were in any case more concerned about the French troops concentrated along the Rhine than about the surviving troops in Italy: by switching to a more prudent defensive tactic in the north of the Peninsula, the Austrians still secured its dominance and could free up forces to deploy in Germany.
The Russian army in the Alps
The march to Switzerland
On September 4, Suvorov informed the tsar that he was about to move to Switzerland, not failing to lament how from the beginning of the campaign the Austrians had been consistently reluctant to support him, slow to respond to his orders and utterly inefficient in meeting his demands for supplies and ammunition. He did not fail to emphasize how the Allies purposely delayed supplies with the intent of forcing him to leave Italy. He wrote among other things:
(...) in spite of our great victories and achievements, they have always limited themselves to writing me only letters of disappointment and full of blame or requests to give advance notice of all military actions. (...) [Nevertheless I am] about to embark on this laborious march to Switzerland.
— Suvorov to Tsar Paul - Documents of Suvorov, September 4, 1799, IV pp. 299-300
Suvorov marched on September 11, immediately after the capture of Tortona, sending baggage, equipment and heavy artillery via Como and Verona to arrive in Switzerland near Chur in the Grisons, and from the Tyrol to Feldkirch, while he with about 27,000 men, including nearly 16,000 infantrymen and more than 3,500 Cossacks, took the Varese route to move toward Bellinzona. On September 15, the Russian vanguard under the command of Pyotr Ivanovich Bagration entered Swiss territory near Ponte Tresa, and after a few days the main army assembled at Taverne in Ticino; Suvorov, who had expected to find supplies there for the following week's march via a caravan of 1,500 mules previously requested from the Austrians, found that the Austrians had sent nothing.
The initial astonishment was succeeded by outrage and then anger: before a contrite General Weyrother, an Austrian liaison officer, he explicitly accused Melas and the Viennese court of having hatched a treason "which the tsar will know how to punish." The senior general wrote an angry letter to Emperor Francis II expressing outrage and lamenting how Austrian inefficiency had nullified the tactical advantage of his rapid march to Switzerland. By this time, however, the damage was done: only six hundred and fifty mules arrived, which was absolutely insufficient, and Suvorov, at Prince Konstantin's suggestion, decided to use the horses of the Cossacks to transport sufficient provisions and ammunition for the next eight days. The Ticinese relate that officers who had horses and carriages available for their personal use had to, according to the Russian commander's orders, surrender the former as beasts of burden and abandon the carriages. The greatest examples were set by Prince Constantine, who sent his three carriages back to Como, and Suvorov himself, who, although in his sixties, abandoned his litter and decided to march on foot as well. In the four days of waiting before they could finally move, the Russian troops were summarily instructed in mountain warfare tactics, with which they were totally unfamiliar.
The assault on the Gotthard Pass and the arrival at Lake Lucerne
On September 21, Suvorov ordered the advance. The march proceeded slowly, slowed by heavy rains, fog, and mountainous terrain. Nevertheless, that evening the entire army was already encamped between Sant'Antonino and Bellinzona, in another day's march passed through Biasca, and on the evening of the 22nd reached Giornico, where the Allied General Staff spent the night. The weather continued to be harsh and, on the night of September 23, a blizzard of rain and snow plagued the army, which was reinforced at Faido by an Austrian regiment under the command of Colonel Gottfried Strauch.
Suvorov then set out to cross the Gotthard by the 25th with the intention of reuniting with Korsakov at Lucerne on Sept. 27; but on the 24th, at Airolo, a French battalion belonging to General Claude Lecourbe's division and commanded by Brigadier General Charles-Étienne Gudin de La Sablonnière halted the march of the Russians, who left six hundred dead on the ground before they were able to penetrate late in the evening into the Val Tremola, with Suvorov remaining in the front line all along.
On the morning of the 25th, the general resumed his march toward Andermatt, while the French had retreated behind the "Buca d'Uri" (a tunnel in the Schöllenen Gorge, on the north side of the Gotthard Pass in the Urseren valley) partially demolishing the Devil's Bridge (a stone crossing in Uri near Andermatt). Here another Lecourbe contingent, under the orders this time of Louis Henri Loison, laid an ambush that cost the lives of more than nine hundred Russians before they managed to repair the bridge by makeshift means and cross to the other side, under constant enemy artillery and musket fire, finally forcing the French to retreat.
In contrast to the Russians, Lecourbe's troops were highly specialized in mountain warfare to the extent that they "marched even where chamois hunters would give up," "used to sleeping in the snow and under the stars, bitten by the wind, on the rags they used as uniforms," and venturing "without [alpine] guides on paths over sheer chasms." They would be a constant thorn in the side of the Allied troops.
Continuing to move to the right along the Reuss valley, Suvorov nonetheless seized the Gotthard Pass by repelling General Lecourbe, and on the evening of September 26 his troops reached Altdorf near the southern end of Lake Lucerne. For the Russian general, the bulk of the effort was accomplished; cheerful and optimistic, he wrote in his own hand, on a dispatch addressed to Austrian General Friedrich von Hotze, a rhyming note in German that has remained famous:
So we have with sabers and bayonets – Saved Switzerland from their ruin.
— Suvorov to Hotze
The general was unaware, however, that in those same hours General Masséna, who had concentrated as many as 77,000 men under his orders, was routing Korsakov's forces in the Second Battle of Zurich, inflicting heavy losses on him and forcing him to beat a retreat to Winterthur and beyond to Schaffhausen, while on the Linth the troops of General Jean-de-Dieu Soult defeated the Austrian troops of General von Hotze, who was killed early in the clash.