ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the Habsburg army, the Austrian army as it was already called in popular parlance, which carried the main burden of the fighting on land against the French Revolution and Napoleon from 1792 to 1814, and with its most capable general, the Archduke Charles. But old method of warfare was called into question by the emergence of a revolutionary regime in France, a regime served by a hastily recruited army which mobilized the entire physical and emotional resources of the nation. It is in this popular participation in war that there arose the great watershed between the old and the new age. While the new system of war practiced by the French ultimately harmonized with a new and more flexible society, this very combination of a new kind of warfare corresponding to a new social order was totally unacceptable to the established dynastic governments and their attendant nobilities.
