Battle of Champaubert, 1814: the first blow of Napoleon's Six Days

In early February 1814 Napoleon's empire looked as if it had weeks to live. The Allied armies had crossed the Rhine, beaten him at La Rothière on 1 February and were marching on Paris, and the army he could put in their way was full of raw conscripts. Ten days later he struck back. Champaubert opened a run of victories in five days, known in English as the Six Days Campaign and in French as the campagne des Cinq-Jours, which gave his young soldiers and the Emperor himself a confidence that the strategic picture did not justify.²

Background: the Allies split up

After La Rothière Napoleon fell back to Troyes on the Seine, and the Allies made the decision that gave him his chance. They divided. Schwarzenberg's Army of Bohemia was to press along the Seine and pin Napoleon there, while Blücher's Army of Silesia turned north into the Marne valley to march on Paris, with only Marshal Macdonald's weak forces in front of it.³

Blücher then tried to do two things at once. He wanted to drive Macdonald back down the Marne, and he wanted to wait for the corps of Kleist and Kapzevich coming up from the east. The result was a dangerous dispersal. On 9 February Yorck was at Dormans on the Marne, Sacken at Montmirail with his vanguard far to the west, Blücher with Kleist and Kapzevich around Vertus and Bergères, and in the middle, at the crossroads of Champaubert, the weak Russian IX Corps of Lieutenant General Zakhar Olsufiev. Petre reckoned that the main column was strung out over some 44 miles (about 70 km); Napoléon et Empire notes that Blücher and his cavalry were almost 80 km apart.⁴

Why did Blücher feel safe? Napoléon et Empire writes that the Allies hardly believed such a march possible from an enemy they had just beaten, and imagined that if it came they would have time to deal with it. F. Loraine Petre, in his history of the campaign, adds that Blücher believed the country between his army and the Aube was still watched by Seslavin's Cossacks, who had in fact gone, and that he took Napoleon to be moving farther south.⁵

Napoleon saw the gap. By 6 February he had conceived a blow at Blücher, in Petre's account the more dangerous and enterprising of his two opponents, and on 7 February he set off north toward Sézanne, leaving a screen on the Seine to hold Schwarzenberg. Napoléon et Empire puts that screen at only 20,000 men; Petre, counting the corps of Victor and Oudinot, Gérard's reserve and the cavalry, at about 39,000. Petre gives the striking force that went north as about 20,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry.⁶ › Napoleon Bonaparte

Marmont led the way. Early on 9 February, from the Champaubert area, he reported Sacken with a large force at Montmirail to the west and Olsufiev on his own at Champaubert. That night Napoleon himself reached Sézanne with the Guard. When Blücher learned that the Emperor was there, he did not pull his corps together: he set off south with Kleist and Kapzevich toward Fère-Champenoise, hoping to get around the French, and left Olsufiev where he was.⁷

Armies and commanders

Napoleon brought the best troops he had left. Rickard counts about 14,000 men of the Imperial Guard under Marshal Ney, 8,000 of Marshal Marmont's VI Corps in the divisions of Lagrange and Ricard, and 2,800 horsemen of General Doumerc's I Cavalry Corps; Petre lists the same commands, with Ney's two divisions of Young Guard and part of the Guard cavalry.⁸

Against them stood a corps in name only. Olsufiev's IX Corps was made up of two weak infantry divisions under Generals Udom and Kornilov. Rickard puts it at 5,000 men and Petre at about 4,000 infantry, while Napoléon et Empire gives figures between 4,500 and 5,000; all agree on 24 guns. It had no cavalry at all, which had been sent forward to the vanguard.⁹

Olsufiev also had a reputation to repair. He had done badly at Brienne on 29 January and at La Rothière, and had been sharply criticized for it. All three of the histories used here link that to his decision to stand when an army closed in on him.¹⁰

The battle in phases

The bridge. Between Napoleon and Champaubert lay the Petit Morin, crossed at Saint-Prix where, Rickard notes, the road from Sézanne ran through a narrow valley that a small force could have held. Olsufiev left it unguarded. Petre explains that he had kept the bridge intact because he expected to march over it himself toward Sézanne, but had posted no one there, and early on 10 February the French cavalry took the crossing without a fight.¹¹

Baye. Olsufiev sent four regiments and six guns forward under Udom, but by then Marmont's corps was across the river. By late morning Ricard had driven the Russians back into Baye and the woods around it, and Lagrange had swung to the left toward the hamlet of Bannay.¹²

Bannay and the arrival of the Guard. The fighting stayed stubborn through the morning. On the French left Lagrange ran into the main Russian battery and was thrown back from Bannay. The balance changed around midday, when Ney and Napoleon came up with two more divisions and the Guard artillery opened fire in front of Bannay.¹³

The wings give way. By about three in the afternoon both Baye and Bannay had been cleared. French cavalry was now working around both Russian flanks, and Napoleon sent a strong body of horsemen west through Fromentières to get behind the Russians and cut the road to Montmirail.¹⁴

Turning point: the road to Étoges is cut

Only now did Olsufiev try to get away. He left a rear guard under General Poltoratsky in Champaubert, two regiments with nine or ten guns, and turned east along the main road toward Étoges and Blücher. The road was already cut.¹⁵

That was the end of IX Corps as a fighting force. Caught between the French infantry and the cavalry, the Russians broke up and fled north into the woods toward La Caure and Épernay. The French had already closed in around the woods, and Olsufiev was captured there with many of his men.¹⁶

Poltoratsky held out longest. Napoléon et Empire describes his men fighting house to house in Champaubert, and Petre has him charged on all sides by cavalry; both say he surrendered only when the ammunition was gone, Petre with about 1,000 men and nine guns. Rickard places the surrender instead in the woods some two miles north of the village, after artillery fire and the discovery of French troops in the trees.¹⁷

Aftermath

The Russian corps was destroyed. Rickard puts its loss at about 1,200 killed and 1,800 prisoners, with most of the guns. Accounts of the survivors differ: about 1,500 men reached Étoges, according to Napoléon et Empire; some 1,600 or 1,700 men and 15 guns got away through the woods, according to Petre; between 1,000 and 2,000 under Kornilov and Udom, in Rickard's estimate.¹⁸

Blücher spent the day marching away from the battle. With Kleist and Kapzevich he headed toward Fère-Champenoise while the guns sounded behind him at Champaubert, and for much of the day he refused to believe that the attack was serious. When the news reached him in the afternoon he turned the column round in a night march back to Vertus and ordered Sacken and Yorck to concentrate at Montmirail and fight their way east to him.¹⁹

Napoleon now stood in the middle of the Army of Silesia, and he turned west. Leaving Marmont to watch Blücher, he marched on Montmirail, where he beat Sacken on 11 February. He caught the retreating Allies at Château-Thierry on 12 February, and on 14 February he struck Blücher himself at Vauchamps, the last of the Six Days victories.²⁰ › Battle of Montmirail, 1814

Legacy and memory

Champaubert has been read ever since as Napoleon at his best and his opponents at their worst. Petre accepted that the operation against Blücher was probably the finest Napoleon made in 1814, but thought both the praise and the blame overdone: in his view the Emperor did not know before he set out how scattered Blücher's army was, and only at Champaubert realized how lucky he had been to strike the middle of a long line. He also noted that even Clausewitz, seldom critical of Blücher, condemned his march away from the sound of the guns, and he judged Olsufiev's decision to fight a grievous mistake.²¹

Napoléon et Empire sees a darker side in the triumph: the victory gave the Emperor too favorable an idea of his position, and he immediately told Caulaincourt, his envoy at the peace talks then under way with the Allies, to take a less accommodating line.²²

In the end the Six Days changed little. Blücher fell back on his reinforcements, took Winzingerode's corps under his command and was marching west again by early March. Paris surrendered on 30 March, and on 6 April Napoleon signed his abdication at Fontainebleau before leaving for Elba.²³ › Battle of Leipzig, 1813

Visiting Champaubert today

Champaubert is a small village of the Marne department on the old road from Châlons to Paris. In its center a column surrounded by eight cannons commemorates the victory. Opposite it stands the Maison Bleue, the house where Napoleon spent the night after the battle, with a cannonball still lodged in its façade.²⁴