Le Soleil d'Austerlitz / The Sun of Austerlitz / Slavkovské slunce (Zuran near Šlapanice, Czech Republic) - La Famille Bonaparte on Waymarking.com

Follow my coordinates and you will finally find a small granite monument with "N" on the Zuran hill, surrounded by four flag poles... Here you can overlook a peaceful landscape of Southern Moravia, close to the town Slavkov-Austerlitz. Only couple miles of the Moravian metropolis Brno, you are staying on French land - no it isn't silly joke - Zuran hill, as an tribute of Czechoslovakia to French nation, is an extraterritorial domain of Republique Francaise...

For me this place has a special significance... One of my family's ancestors came from France to Bohemia in 17th century, uncle with family is living in Paris, France is every year the target of our holiday trips and moreover - my wife's mother line has a real Bonaparte's blood among ancestors...

Žurán Hill, not far from the former imperial road between Brno - Olomouc, is actually an artificially piled up tumulus from the Era of the migration of people, it is both one of the most famous and most historically precious localities of the Slavkov-Austerlitz battlefield. Žurán was the general HQs of the French army at the beginning of the battle. Emperor Napoleon and his entourage dined at "Pindulka", a nearby inn, the night before the battle. Later, he rested in a makeshift shanty not far from a quarry for a short time.

During the night, he received a message regarding the strategical plans of the allied armies for the upcoming battle. They intended to besiege the French army from the south, to cut its escape route to Vienna from where it expected its reinforcements to come, and to drive it back towards the Bohemian-Moravian Uplands (Ceskomoravská vrchovina). The blockade of the French from the right-hand side was supposed to be later undertaken by General Bagration's Column in the northern part of the battlefield. Napoleon responded to the strategy of the allied armies with a brilliant counterstroke through the middle of the battlefront to the headquarters of the main forces of the allied armies on Pratecký Hill.

This manoeuvre, called a "Lion's Leap", was preceded by the assembly of a strong task force in the befogged Rokytnice River valley between Žurán and Pratecký Hills in the hours before dawn. Shortly after 8 AM, when the famous sun of Slavkov, le soleil d'Austerlitz, was already upon the horizon of Pratecké Heights (Pratecké výšiny), and after a final short meeting with the headquarters staff on Žurán, Napoleon ordered the commander of the 4th Column, Marshal Soult, to launch the decisive attack against the allied armies' position. The successful attack on Old Vineyards (Staré vinohrady) and Pratecký Hill created the conditions for an overall victory for the Great French Army in the Battle of Slavkov.

In 1930, a stone monument of with a plastic map showing the positions of the individual armies before the decisive clash, as a reminder of the glorious victory, was unveiled on Žurán in the presence of Czechoslovak and French generality - as an expression of the Czechoslovak-French friendship.

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