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I'm reading about Napoleon and his associated wars, and it's stuck out to me that Austria spent most of the two decades of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars being France's punching bag. Time and time again, I'm reading about entire Austrian armies of tens or hundreds of thousands of men and hundreds of guns being captured or destroyed by Napoleon, with all their supplies and baggage
Austria was a part of every single coalition arrayed against France except one, and only the final two of these coalitions was victorious. Until Napoleon's army was destroyed in Russia, Austria was on the losing side of every single war it had with France. Austria's defeats stripped away first its most valuable and strategic territories and spheres of influence in Belgium, Northern Italy, and the Rhine, and then it was mostly ejected from Germany, and then its final remaining strategic defenses against France in the Alps and the Balkan littoral were taken
And despite this, Austria was still able to provide the bulk of the combat power, the plans, and took the bulk of the casualties in the battles in Saxony that would finally see Napoleon defeated (and arguably the bulk of combat power in all the coalitions before that except the 4th
Meanwhile, Prussia suffered a single catastrophic defeat in the War of the 5th Coalition and took most of a decade to recover before joining the final campaigns against Napoleon in 1813
And of course, Austria was famously a highly multiethnic empire, without colonial holdings or significant overseas trade, with most of its holdings either subject to the ravages of repeated wars or in an area of Europe that was relatively less wealthy, populated, and developed
How was Austria able to repeatedly suffer catastrophic defeats, lose major parts of its empire, and still get back up and fight the next war against France a few years later each time?
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