Franz Petrasch

Franz, Freiherr von Petrasch (1746 – 17 January 1820) was an Austrian general officer serving in the Austrian Empire during the French Revolutionary Wars. He was the third generation of a bourgeois family in which two brothers, seeking adventure, joined the Habsburg military and rose through the ranks. The family was elevated to the Moravia nobility in the early eighteenth century, and to the Hungarian nobility in 1722.

Franz Petrasch served throughout the Habsburg's wars with France, in particular the Rhine Campaign of 1796 and the Swiss campaigns of 1799.

The Petrasch family was established in Moravia, near Brno, a wealth family of bourgeois origins. Two brothers, Ernst Anton and Maximilian, emerged in the late seventeenth century. They joined the military and in 1695 fought under Count Friedrich Veterani in the seven cavalry regiments of 6,500 men and 800 infantry at Lugos against Sultan Mustafa II. Ernst Anton later served in the War of the Spanish SuccessionHe had a son, Ernst Gottlieb. Maximilian was badly injured at Lugos; this wound never healed and in later life made it difficult, or impossible, for him to mount a horse. Eventually he retired to his estate near Breslau, where he died at the age of 56 after several weeks of suffering. He had married Maria Anna, Countess of Becker, and had a son, Joseph von Petrasch, the famous Enlightenment scholar and founder of The Society of Anonymous Scholars in the Austrian Lands, of which he was president until 1758. Joseph and Anne von Hettersdorf married eventually they had three daughters.

Ernst Gottlieb, son of Ernst Anton, had been born in Teschen, Austrian Silesia, in 1708. Like his cousin Joseph, he also enjoyed a good education. The educated and informed baron soon gained the favor of the Empress Maria Theresa. Petrasch organized the illuminations and fireworks on the occasion of the second marriage of the Archduke with Josepha of Bavaria in the Schwarzenberg Garden. As an imperial favorite, he was given the castle Holitsch, and made master of Prerau. The Empress extended his father's barony to an Hungarian barony 30 January 1767. Earnst Gottlieb married Elizabeth von Fritz (or Friss), a favorite maid of the Empress Maria Theresa, and they had a son, Franz, born in 1746 at the family estate in Prerau, and a daughter, who married the son of Claude-Hyacinthe-Henri Foucher, Baron de Bretton (d. 24 March 1779). Ernst Gottlieb died in Vienna on 30 June 1792.

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