Les principes de la stratégie développés par la relation de la campagne de 1796 en Allemagne
(Traduction du allemand par Antoine-Henri Jomini)
Archiduc Charles (Karl von Österreich-Teschen)
Magimel, Anselin et Pochard, Paris, 1818
This influential military treatise presents the strategic reflections of Archduke Charles of Austria, based on his command experience during the 1796 Rhine campaign of the French Revolutionary Wars.
The work is structured as both a campaign narrative and a theoretical analysis of warfare. Archduke Charles uses the operations in Germany in 1796—part of the broader War of the First Coalition—to illustrate general principles of strategy, including the importance of interior lines, concentration of force, maneuver, and the relationship between geography and operational planning.
The 1796 campaign, fought against French armies advancing into southern Germany, provides the foundation for his discussion of how a numerically inferior or strategically constrained army can resist a larger and more aggressive opponent through disciplined operational design. He examines movements along the Rhine, engagements in Swabia and Bavaria, and the coordination of Austrian forces across extended fronts.
This French edition, translated and shaped in part by Jomini’s intellectual influence, helped spread Archduke Charles’s strategic ideas across Europe. It became an important reference point in 19th-century military education, particularly for officers studying the evolution of modern operational warfare.
Beyond its historical narrative, the book is significant as one of the earliest systematic attempts by a major field commander to extract universal principles of strategy from a real campaign, bridging practical military experience with formal strategic theory.
