Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande, 1870: the Army of the Loire's road to Paris blocked

By late November 1870 Paris was under siege, and the new French armies raised in the provinces had one task: break through to the capital. At Beaune-la-Rolande, a small walled town in the Loiret, the Army of the Loire tried for the first time. A single Prussian corps held off a force several times its size until help came at dusk, and young French soldiers, many of them under fire for the first time, paid for a plan made far from the battlefield.²

Who won the Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande and why?

The Germans won. The Prussian X Corps held the walled town against forces several times its size until the III Corps arrived and drove the French back at dusk. The French attack failed because its two corps fought separately, under a plan sent by telegraph from Tours, which nonetheless called the day a successful diversion.³

Background: after Coulmiers

The Army of the Loire was a creation of the Government of National Defense, raised in the autumn of 1870 after the disasters of the summer. Friedrich Engels, following the campaign from London, described its mix of old soldiers recalled to the colors, raw recruits and volunteers, put together in great haste. On 9 November it won at Coulmiers and retook Orléans, a victory that restored French confidence.⁴ › Battle of Coulmiers, 1870

The success came too late to change the balance. The surrender of Metz on 27 October had freed Prince Frederick Charles's Second Army, which marched south toward the Loire, and by late November its corps stood in a long arc north of Orléans, from the roads near Pithiviers east toward Beaune-la-Rolande and Montargis.⁵

On paper the French had the numbers. Moltke puts the French army around Orléans at about 200,000 men, against no more than 45,000 German infantry at that moment. Engels, writing in December, counted some 120,000 to 130,000 real combatants in d'Aurelle's five fighting corps, against fewer than 90,000 men all told under Prince Frederick Charles.⁶

The government delegation in Tours pressed for a new offensive. General d'Aurelle de Paladines, the army's commander, objected, and both he and Moltke describe the plan being taken out of his hands: Moltke writes that Gambetta took the dispositions himself, while d'Aurelle, in his memoir of 1872, blames Gambetta's delegate for war, Charles de Freycinet, who sent orders by telegraph straight to the corps commanders. Freycinet's own account, published in 1871, prints those telegrams, each copied to d'Aurelle. The aim was to push past Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande toward Fontainebleau and so toward the army of Paris. D'Aurelle warned that the move would bring on 70,000 to 80,000 Germans; Moltke records the same warning of some 80,000 enemies in open country.⁷ › Siege of Paris, 1870

Freycinet had a second purpose. The German detachment of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg was moving west of Orléans toward Le Mans and Vendôme, and a push on the French right, toward Montargis, Pithiviers and Beaune, was meant to pull German strength back toward the center. D'Aurelle dismissed this as a pretext and wrote that the so-called diversion had no effect at all.⁸

Armies and commanders

The attack fell to General Crouzat, who commanded the XX Corps and, by order from Tours, the movement of the XVIII Corps as well. Moltke and Cassell's history of the war, published in London in 1871, both put the French engaged at about 60,000.⁹

The XVIII Corps was barely formed. Its designated commander, General Bourbaki, had not arrived, and it was led by its chief of staff, a young colonel named Billot; some of its battalions and part of its artillery reserve were still missing, and many of its men were under fire for the first time. The XX Corps was in little better shape: d'Aurelle calls it neither properly constituted nor organized, and short of everything it needed for a winter campaign. Cassell's history, summarizing the French account, also describes the troops as young conscripts under fire for the first time.¹⁰

Facing them stood the X Corps of General von Voigts-Rhetz, spread out around Beaune-la-Rolande to bar the roads toward Fontainebleau. Moltke counts 11,000 men; Cassell gives about 30,000 Germans engaged, counting the reinforcements that came up during the day. The III Corps of General von Alvensleben lay farther west toward Pithiviers, the column whose arrival would decide the day.¹¹

The battle in phases

Prelude: Ladon and Maizières, 24 November. The first clash came four days early. When Crouzat tried to occupy Maizières with a battalion, he reported, his corps met a violent attack on the roads to Ladon and Beaune-la-Rolande that lasted into the afternoon. Moltke and Cassell describe the same fight from the German side: Prussian brigades took Maizières and Ladon and drove the French back. Moltke blames the loss of the fight on the unsteadiness of the XVIII and XX Corps.¹²

The orders. Late on 26 November Freycinet telegraphed the orders for the attack: Crouzat and Billot were to act together, occupy Beaune-la-Rolande, Maizières and Juranville before nightfall on the 27th, dig in and await further orders. Crouzat set the attack for the 28th, the XVIII Corps on the right through Juranville and the XX on the left through Boiscommun, with Cathelineau's volunteers sent forward to Courcelles on the flank.¹³

28 November, morning: the French right. On the French right the XVIII Corps drove in the Prussian outposts in front of Juranville early in the morning and took the village. A Prussian counterattack by Colonel von Valentini's 56th Regiment retook Juranville after a stubborn fight but had to give it up again when strong French columns came up, Moltke writes, carrying off 300 prisoners as it went. D'Aurelle's account likewise credits the XVIII Corps with taking Maizières and Juranville, but adds that it could reach Beaune-la-Rolande, where the XX Corps needed it, only at nightfall.¹⁴

Afternoon: Les Cotelles. About two o'clock the XVIII Corps attacked the German position at Long Cour, but the attack had not been prepared by artillery and broke down under the fire of five Prussian batteries, Moltke writes. A repeated attack on Les Cotelles succeeded, and the Germans gave up the village with the loss of fifty prisoners. Freycinet, from the French side, says the corps dislodged the enemy from all its positions and held Les Cotelles for some hours.¹⁵

Midday: the French left closes in. On the left the XX Corps came on against Beaune from the north and west, pushing through Batilly. It drove in the German outposts and captured a Prussian gun whose crew and horses had nearly all been killed; both Moltke and Cassell record the loss of the gun. The Prussian 16th Regiment was left isolated in Beaune, nearly surrounded.¹⁶

Afternoon: the burning town. The 16th Regiment held the town, which was ringed by the remains of a high wall, and turned the walled churchyard into a strongpoint. The French brought up their guns and bombarded it, and both Moltke and Cassell describe buildings set on fire by the shells, but every attempt to storm the place was beaten off.¹⁷

Turning point: the III Corps arrives

The rescue came from the III Corps. At Pithiviers the first news from Beaune sounded so little alarming that the corps artillery went back to its quarters, but as the gunfire grew General von Alvensleben ordered the corps forward, and General von Stülpnagel had already set out with the 5th Division on his own initiative, Moltke writes. Prince Frederick Charles came up in person, as both Cassell and Freycinet record.¹⁸

From about 4:30 the leading regiments attacked the French at Batilly and on the west side of Beaune, recaptured the lost gun and drove the French off, while the 1st Cavalry Division, coming up from Boynes, threatened the French flank. Crouzat's own dispatch that night, which d'Aurelle prints, explains the French withdrawal by the arrival of a strong enemy column with much artillery from Pithiviers. Cassell judges that without these reinforcements the Germans would probably have been beaten, for their position had been critical.¹⁹

The French had no reinforcement of their own to match it. The XV Corps, which was to have moved on Pithiviers, was a full day's march away, d'Aurelle complains, so the two wings of the offensive could not support each other; Moltke likewise writes that the French plan failed because its two separate attacks had little influence on each other. Even the volunteer bands of Cathelineau, posted on the flank at Courcelles, are judged differently: very useful in covering the XX Corps according to d'Aurelle, inactive according to Moltke.²⁰

By nightfall the XX Corps had fallen back toward Boiscommun. The accounts disagree about the XVIII Corps: Moltke has it holding the ground it had won around Juranville, d'Aurelle has it falling back on Ladon. They disagree about the town as well. Moltke has the X Corps encamped around Long Cour, Beaune and Batilly that night, while d'Aurelle and Freycinet write that the Germans left Beaune during the night, Freycinet adding that they first set fire to the houses that made the position strong; d'Aurelle has them back in the town the next morning, once the French had gone.²¹

Counting the losses

The losses differ by source. Moltke counts 900 German and 1,300 French killed and wounded, and 1,800 unwounded French prisoners. Cassell reports German claims of 1,000 French dead, 4,000 wounded and 1,600 prisoners, against a German loss of nearly 1,000. The French accounts give no overall figure; d'Aurelle writes only that the two corps had suffered heavily and were in no state to resume the offensive.²²

Among the French dead was Frédéric Bazille. Born in Montpellier in 1841 into a Protestant family, he had studied painting in Paris and worked beside Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir in the years when Impressionism took shape. He was killed in the assault on Beaune-la-Rolande on 28 November 1870, one of the young men of the new armies.²³

Aftermath

On the evening of the 28th Tours told Crouzat to give up the offensive for the present, and d'Aurelle advised him to hold his positions. The next night, however, Freycinet congratulated both corps commanders on a vigorous thrust that, he wrote, had fully achieved its aim by halting the German turning movements toward Le Mans and Vendôme, and the government decreed that the XVIII Corps had deserved well of the country.²⁴

Writing in London four days after the battle, Friedrich Engels counted Beaune-la-Rolande among a string of French defeats that week, from Amiens to the sorties from Paris, and expected its main effect to be to frustrate the relief of the capital. After a further defeat at Loigny on 2 December the French evacuated Orléans again on 5 December, and the government left Tours for Bordeaux.²⁵

Legacy and memory

The battle quickly became a matter of blame. D'Aurelle's memoir is a long indictment of a war run by telegraph from Tours, which in his view threw a half-formed and ill-supplied corps at Beaune for a diversion that achieved nothing. Freycinet's account, published a year earlier, presents the same days as a series of successful engagements. Cassell's history of 1871 instead faults d'Aurelle himself for advancing only his right wing, and Engels judged two weeks later that d'Aurelle had handled his troops badly, with only a small part of them ready for his first attempt to break through.²⁶

For France the day is remembered above all through Bazille. Larousse credits him with an important part in the formation of Impressionism, through his talent and through the friendships he fostered among young artists in Paris from 1863, and the Musée protestant notes that his early death cut short a career that had barely begun.²⁷