Just to add to this - if 1.8 Austria is anything like 1.7 Austria, then (especially with France's manpower) it is best to just chase them back to Austria, murder them as they try and reinforce and regroup and then keep a smaller stack to just rove around and kill newly-raised regiments while you methodically siege anything else.
Realistically, unless you're facing a major pan-Western-European coalition, are low on manpower due to previous wars or are in the midst of the Religious Turmoil modifier, it should be very difficult to lose as France, even without Lucky Nation generals.
Sometimes I believe people on this forum don't play the same game as me...
France starts indeed with very good generals and ~50 tradition. If you decide to blob like crazy and don't follow with defensive and/or innovative, the tradition will drop and remain at ~20-30. Every big battle you win will net you 0.5 tradition in the best case, and most of the time you win almost no tradition in wars (unless you carpet siege big areas). That's why around 1550, battles against lucky non-blobs and its allies are a real pain, you have no trad thus shitty generals, whereas the enemy has godlike leaders. Even with 15 bonus discipline you can lose.
Smart boys here advise to sit on the mountain, waiting for the enemy to come suicide. This NEVER happens. Unless the enemy has the power to stackwipe you, he'll never attack a mountain, sieging all the surrounding provinces instead.
PS
Regarding Austria, this country hires a lot of mercenaries when needed, burning the manpower is not enough. The best thing you can do to put the white blob into the dumpster for the rest of the game is to attack him with allies when he's weak. Carpet siege all provinces and release styria for 100% warscore. Without tyrol's gold and the 2/3 of his cores the Habsburgs are done. Guarantee Styria when the truce is over because Austria will want to take back the cores.
