Battle of Coulmiers, 1870: France's rare victory on the Loire

By November 1870 France had lost its emperor and its regular armies. Napoleon III had surrendered at Sedan, Paris was under siege, and Marshal Bazaine's army had capitulated at Metz. Yet the new republic fought on with armies raised in a few weeks, and at Coulmiers, west of Orléans, one of them won a battle. It was a real victory, but a brief one.²

Who won the Battle of Coulmiers and why?

The French won. D'Aurelle de Paladines brought about 70,000 men against some 20,000 Bavarians and Prussians and attacked along a front so wide that von der Tann could not hold it. After four hours, with his single brigade at Coulmiers facing three and his line of retreat threatened, the Bavarian general broke off and fell back toward Artenay.³

An army out of nothing

After the fall of the Empire, the Government of National Defense stayed in besieged Paris but sent a delegation to Tours. Léon Gambetta, Minister of the Interior and of War, could only leave the capital by balloon, and in October he joined the delegation and took charge. Moltke, chief of the Prussian General Staff, describes him ruling almost as a dictator. With Charles de Freycinet as his delegate at the War Ministry he raised about 600,000 men and put 1,400 guns into the field within weeks, figures given both by Moltke and by the Encyclopédie Larousse. Friedrich Engels, writing as a military commentator at the time, called it immensely to the credit of the French people that they had created a new army out of nothing in three months.⁴

The quality of the new troops varied enormously. Engels described everything from old soldiers recalled to the ranks to raw recruits and volunteers who would accept no discipline, alongside solid battalions such as the Papal Zouaves. D'Aurelle, in the account of the campaign he published in 1872, admits that his Gardes Mobiles arrived from their provinces so unruly that they frightened the people they were meant to protect, and says that ten days of daily drill at the camp of Salbris turned them into obedient troops.⁵

In October the Bavarians of General Ludwig von der Tann took Orléans after a fight at Artenay. The Larousse entry describes the I Army of the Loire, the XV and XVI Corps, formed by d'Aurelle at the camp of Salbris. Given the weakness of von der Tann's force, councils of war at Salbris and Tours decided in late October to win back Orléans, attacking chiefly from the west by way of Blois, while other troops came up from Gien on the upper Loire.⁶

The commanders' plans

The French plan was more cautious than it sounded. Freycinet's instructions of 27 October, which d'Aurelle reprinted in his book, told him to build a fortified camp around Orléans for 150,000 to 200,000 men as soon as he got there, so that his army could defy any Prussian attempt to dislodge it. Moltke likewise records that no further advance was planned for the moment and that d'Aurelle's orders were to form an entrenched camp at Orléans for 200,000 men.⁷

The French corps gathered in early November along the lower Loire and behind the forest of Marchenoir. On 7 November a Prussian reconnaissance in force ran into strong French troops under General Antoine Chanzy at the edge of the forest and broke off after a sharp fight, which the French called the combat of Vallière. Both French corps were already on the march, the XV toward the Mauve and the XVI toward Coulmiers, while the cavalry of General Reyau was sent north to get around the Bavarian right and cut the road to Paris.⁸

Von der Tann knew that he was about to be attacked from the west and threatened from the east as well. Moltke explains his choice: he would not fight in the thick woods, where his relatively strong artillery and cavalry would be of little use and he might be surrounded, so he chose to meet the nearest French force in the open country around Coulmiers, closer to the Prussian 22nd Division at Chartres. The French found the Bavarians waiting. Chanzy writes that they had clearly decided to stand on the defensive on ground they had chosen and prepared, and d'Aurelle describes villages, châteaux and farms loopholed and barricaded. Only a small detachment stayed in Orléans to guard the hospitals.⁹

Four hours at Coulmiers

On the morning of 9 November the I Bavarian Corps stood on the edge of the woods between the Château de Montpipeau and Rosières, with Coulmiers in front. The French moved off at about eight o'clock in two lines across a bare, open plain, and at half past nine the guns of the XV Corps opened fire on the village of Baccon. Their great advantage in numbers let them spread far around both Bavarian flanks: d'Aurelle held the Bavarians in the south with the XV Corps, while Chanzy sent General Barry's division against the center and Admiral Jauréguiberry's division against the right. By noon, Moltke notes, von der Tann's three brigades were holding a front of more than four miles.¹⁰

On the French right, General Peytavin's division drove the Bavarian riflemen out of Baccon and went on to attack the château of La Renardière, which d'Aurelle says his infantry finally carried with the bayonet. The Bavarians fell back in good order to the woods of Montpipeau. There, Moltke writes, six batteries between the points of the forest stopped the French from advancing further on that wing.¹¹

In the center Barry's division had been slowed by flanking fire from Baccon and reached Saintry only around noon. It drove Bavarian riflemen out of the stone quarries in front of Coulmiers, but its first attacks on the village failed: the Bavarian 4th Brigade held the walled park with its guns, charges by its supporting cavalry and the bayonet, and even threw the French out of the village again. Both French commanders record that Barry then dismounted and led his men forward on foot, shouting “Forward, long live France!”¹²

D'Aurelle sent in the brigade of General Dariès, which had been held in reserve, and Moltke confirms that this brigade came up south of Coulmiers and added its guns to the fire on the village. After four hours one Bavarian brigade was facing three. By four o'clock, Chanzy writes, Coulmiers was entirely in French hands, and Moltke has fresh French troops forcing their way into the park at that hour as the Bavarians pulled out.¹³

The hardest fighting of the afternoon was in the north. Admiral Jauréguiberry, a naval officer commanding a division of infantry, pushed toward Champs and Cheminiers, where the Bavarian 2nd Brigade under General von Orff met him with heavy artillery fire. A battalion of the 37th that got into Champs was driven out, and the French wavered until the admiral rallied them in person. Von Orff then held his ground in front of Gémigny to cover the retreat. Only at about five o'clock did Jauréguiberry's men storm Champs and Ormeteau.¹⁴

On the far left the French cavalry failed. Instead of riding around the Bavarian flank, General Reyau spent his strength cannonading the villages of Saint-Sigismond and Champs, which were stoutly defended. A patrol then mistook the Paris volunteers of Lieutenant Colonel Lipowski for Germans, and Reyau, believing his flank was turned, fell back to Prénouvellon, where he had started that morning. The road to Paris was left open.¹⁵

At four in the afternoon von der Tann had ordered a retreat by brigades toward Artenay, and his rear guards fought on until dark to cover it. The French slept on the battlefield, without fires, as rain and snow began to fall.¹⁶

Why the French did not pursue

The victory was not followed up. D'Aurelle gives his reasons: the battle ended only at nightfall, the cavalry that should have taken up the chase had gone back to its camps, his men were exhausted, and he distrusted night operations with young troops. Chanzy, who thought he had been outflanked, had pulled his left back and expected a fresh attack in the morning. In the dark and the sleet, Chanzy adds, nobody yet knew how complete the success had been.¹⁷

By morning, d'Aurelle reckoned, the Bavarians were twelve hours ahead. Only the chief of staff of Jauréguiberry, Commandant de Lambilly, set off after them with a few dozen dragoons and hussars of the admiral's escort. Beyond Saint-Péravy he caught the tail of the German convoy and brought back two guns and their teams, a long string of ammunition and baggage wagons and over a hundred prisoners, five of them officers: about a hundred by d'Aurelle's count, 130 by Chanzy's.¹⁸

Counting the losses

The figures depend on who is counting. Moltke puts the fight at 20,000 Germans against 70,000 French and the German loss at about 800 killed and wounded, with the French loss nearly double. D'Aurelle quotes the German official report as 42 officers and 650 men killed or wounded and reported his own loss as about 1,500 killed or wounded. Chanzy gives the exact toll of his XVI Corps alone: 146 killed, 5 of them officers, 918 wounded, 37 of them officers, and 220 missing.¹⁹

Prisoners are just as uncertain. Moltke admits the loss of an ammunition column, 150 prisoners and the sick who could not be moved from Orléans. Chanzy counts about 2,000 prisoners taken as a result of the recapture of Orléans and d'Aurelle 2,500, not counting the wounded, so the French totals include the men left behind in the city.²⁰

Orléans retaken

The Bavarians marched through the night on bad roads and reached Artenay by morning, and their stores went back by rail to Toury. In the French lines the news arrived at dawn, first as rumor and then as certainty: the German army had evacuated Orléans. Moltke judged that von der Tann had got out of a difficult position with much skill and good fortune.²¹

The victory mattered in France. Freycinet, Gambetta's delegate at the War Ministry, later called it the first victory granted to France since the start of the war and wrote that the battle and the occupation of Orléans the next day made a deep impression at home and abroad. The Larousse entry says that the victory and the recovery of Orléans restored confidence, and Engels saw it as the opening of the whole Loire campaign.²²

Should d'Aurelle have marched on Paris?

D'Aurelle stayed in a strong position before Orléans, began the fortified camp his instructions called for and waited for reinforcements. The decision started a quarrel that outlived the war. Freycinet wrote in 1871 that if the army had marched on Paris immediately after taking Orléans, it would have succeeded. D'Aurelle answered in his own book that sending 70,000 to 80,000 newly raised, badly equipped soldiers through the German lines, with Prince Frederick Charles's army coming up on their flank, would have been reckless and would have exposed the army to certain destruction.²³

Freycinet himself conceded that the chance, if there was one, had lasted only days: from 15 November the troops of Prince Frederick Charles began to arrive, while the Army of the Loire had not yet been reinforced. Moltke records that on the day of Coulmiers the head of that army had just reached Troyes on its march from Metz.²⁴

Why it could not last

Time was against France. The surrender of Metz on 27 October had freed the Prussian Second Army of Prince Frederick Charles, which was already marching west. When d'Aurelle tried to break through to Paris, whose garrison tried to break out at Champigny on 30 November and 2 December, he was beaten at Beaune-la-Rolande on 28 November and at Loigny and Artenay on 2 and 3 December, and Orléans was lost again on 5 December. Three years earlier, a French brigade had fought for the Pope on the other side of the Alps at Mentana.²⁵ › Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande, 1870

After the loss of Orléans the Army of the Loire split in two. Chanzy formed the Second Army of the Loire from the troops north of the river and fought on until he was beaten at Le Mans on 11 and 12 January 1871. The government signed an armistice on 28 January, and by the Treaty of Frankfurt of 10 May France gave up Alsace and Metz. Coulmiers remained one of the very few battles of the war that France won.²⁶