Battle of Aldenhoven (1794)
The Battle of Aldenhoven or Battle of the Roer saw a Republican French army commanded by Jean Baptiste Jourdan defeat a Habsburg army under François Sébastien Charles Joseph de Croix, Count of Clerfayt which was defending the line of the Roer River. A key crossing was won by the French right wing at Düren after heavy fighting. The Austrian retreat from the Roer conceded control of the west bank of the Rhine River to France. The battle occurred during the War of the First Coalition, part of a wider conflict called the Wars of the French Revolution. Aldenhoven is located in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany about 21 kilometres northeast of Aachen.
General Jean Baptiste Jourdan
Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, 1st Count Jourdan, was a French military commander who served during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. He was made a Marshal of the Empire by Emperor Napoleon I in 1804. He was also a Jacobin politician during the Directory phase of the French Revolution, serving as member of the Council of Five Hundred between 1797 and 1799.
Portrait as Marshal of the Empire
Jourdan's birth home in Limoges, with a commemorative plaque installed during the Second Republic
Detail of an equestrian portrait of Jourdan by Johann Dryander, 1794
The Battle of Fleurus in 1794, won by Jourdan over Coalition forces led by the princes of Coburg and Orange. Painting by Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse (1837)