Battle of Montmirail, 1814: Napoleon's second blow of the Six Days

Montmirail was the second of the four blows Napoleon struck at Blücher's Army of Silesia in February 1814, the run of victories known as the Six Days Campaign. It was fought in deep mud by the veterans of the Guard and by the young conscripts of 1814, and for a whole afternoon it hung on the fate of a single village. It showed Napoleon at his most dangerous, a few weeks before his empire fell.²

Background: France invaded

By the end of 1813 Napoleon had been driven back to the Rhine, and on the last day of the year Blücher's army crossed it into France. Two great armies advanced on Paris: the Army of Bohemia under the Austrian Prince Schwarzenberg and the Army of Silesia under the Prussian field marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. On 1 February 1814 they beat Napoleon at La Rothière, and he fell back toward the Seine.³ › Battle of Leipzig, 1813

The Allies then made the mistake Napoleon had been waiting for. They split up: Schwarzenberg was to pin him on the Seine while Blücher marched on Paris along the Marne. At the peace congress of Châtillon they raised their terms and demanded that France go back to its old frontiers from before the revolutionary wars. Blücher's corps were strung out along the road toward Paris, each of them open to attack on its own.⁴

Napoleon came north from the Seine, determined, in Britannica's words, to stake everything on a last offensive with a heavily outnumbered force. On 10 February he fell on the isolated Russian corps of General Olsufiev at Champaubert and destroyed it. That put him in the middle of the Army of Silesia, between Blücher to the east and his two western corps beyond Montmirail.⁵ › Battle of Champaubert, 1814

Armies and commanders

Blücher fell back east to Vertus and ordered his two western corps, the Russians of General Fabian von der Osten-Sacken and the Prussians of General Ludwig Yorck, to concentrate at Montmirail and break through to him. Sacken's corps, his cavalry under Vasilchikov and two infantry corps, had been marching west toward Paris and turned back on the night of 10 February. Its strength is given variously: about 14,000 men in John Rickard's account, 18,000 in Britannica's. F. Loraine Petre, the British historian of the campaign, cites figures from 16,300 to 20,000 and reckons Sacken should have had about 18,000.⁶

Sacken was sure of himself. Napoléon et Empire records that a source he trusted had convinced him only a small French detachment barred his way, and Petre has him dismissing a warning from Yorck and insisting he faced a weak detachment. He had no idea that Napoleon himself was there. Yorck, more cautious, had urged him to fall back on Château-Thierry, and would come on only slowly, having left his heavy artillery behind because of the state of the roads.⁷

Napoleon's own numbers are just as disputed. Rickard counts about 27,000 men on the way but far fewer at the start, because the columns came up gradually over roads deep in mud. Britannica says he took 18,000 men to Montmirail, Napoléon et Empire gives 16,300, and Petre notes that the French historian Henry Houssaye allowed him only 12,800. His troops included the Old Guard division of General Friant, Marshal Ney's command, General Ricard's division of conscripts from Marmont's corps and the Guard cavalry of General Nansouty, with Marshal Mortier's Guard infantry still on the road.⁸

The battle in phases

The night march. Napoleon left Marshal Marmont to watch Blücher and marched west through the night. Nansouty's cavalry drove the Cossacks out of Montmirail early on the 11th, and Napoleon took up position west of the town, between Sacken and Yorck, to keep them apart.⁹

Marchais, eleven in the morning. At about 11 a.m. Sacken attacked south of the main road and drove Ricard's men out of the hamlet of Marchais and the farms beside it. Ricard was sent back in, and a furious fight for the village followed; Napoléon et Empire says it changed hands five times. By about two in the afternoon the French had still not retaken it, and the Russians kept feeding fresh troops into the fight.¹⁰

Ney against the center. To keep Marchais going, Sacken had thinned his center. Napoleon saw it and sent Ney forward with Friant's Old Guard. Napoléon et Empire describes Ney leading the grenadiers on foot in a bayonet charge on a fortified farm, and Petre has the attack breaking through Sacken's first line before Russian reserves restored it. Charges by the Guard cavalry broke up Russian infantry trying to get across the road to the north.¹¹

The Prussians arrive. At about three o'clock Yorck's two leading brigades reached Fontenelle, north of the battlefield, and Mortier arrived from the east with General Michel's Guard division. Napoleon sent Michel north against the Prussians, who were thrown back after a stubborn fight around Bailly, while Marshal Lefebvre led two battalions of the Guard and what was left of Ricard's division back into Marchais.¹²

Turning point: the fall of Marchais

Marchais was finally in French hands by about four o'clock. Its defenders, charged by French cavalry as they came out, were nearly all killed or taken. Around five Sacken gave up and turned his battered corps north across country toward Yorck and the Château-Thierry road, exposing his flank to French fire as he went.¹³

Yorck's arrival had come too late to win the battle, but in time to save Sacken. Petre judges that the Prussians' timely intervention bought the time for the remains of the Russian corps to get away and join them. The fighting ended with darkness, at about eight in the evening, and the French were too exhausted to pursue that night.¹⁴

Aftermath

The losses were heavy on both sides, and every source counts them differently. Rickard gives the French about 2,000 and the Allies about 3,000 casualties and 700 prisoners, most of them Russian. Napoléon et Empire has the same French figure against 3,000 to 4,000 Allied dead, wounded and prisoners, with some 20 guns. Petre counts about 900 Prussians and, for Sacken, about 2,000 killed and wounded, 800 prisoners, 6 standards and 13 guns. Britannica sums up nearly 4,000 Allied losses, the French half as many.¹⁵

It was a victory without a trap. Rickard writes that Napoleon had ordered Marshal Macdonald up the Marne to seize the bridge at Château-Thierry, behind the Allies, and that his failure let them escape. Napoléon et Empire notes that Macdonald's troops had fallen back to Meaux and could not act, and Petre explains that Macdonald had himself destroyed the bridge at Trilport and could not get across the river in time. The next day, 12 February, the French caught the Allied rearguard at Château-Thierry and drove it across the Marne, but Sacken and Yorck got away with most of their men.¹⁶

Napoleon then turned back east and, on 14 February at Vauchamps, beat Blücher himself. In four days the Army of Silesia had been badly mauled and scattered. The victories also hardened Napoleon's diplomacy: Britannica and Petre both note that the successes encouraged him to hope again for the natural frontiers of the Rhine and the Alps, terms he had been offered the previous November.¹⁷

Legacy and memory

The Fondation Napoléon ranks Napoleon's generalship in the campaign of 1814 with that of his first Italian campaign, achieved with a small army of veterans and raw recruits against an enemy who outnumbered him. It did not save him. Britannica's verdict is that he had spent himself and his troops to achieve only a postponement of defeat, and before the spring was out he had been forced to abdicate and go into exile on Elba.¹⁸ › Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon himself made the most of the victory. Petre notes that he wrote to his brother Joseph a wildly exaggerated account of it, and defends him: Napoleon said openly that bulletins were not history and that the enemy should always be made to believe one's forces were immense. Painters kept the battle alive, from Horace Vernet's picture of 1822, now in the National Gallery in London and shown at the top of this page, to the Polish painter Wojciech Kossak's canvas of 1907.¹⁹

Visiting today

The battlefield lies along the road west of Montmirail, in the Marne, around the village of Marchais-en-Brie. Under the Second Empire, in 1866, a commemorative column was raised at the spot where Napoleon stood at the decisive moment of the battle; it was inaugurated in 1867, carries the dates of the February 1814 battles on its pedestal and has been a listed historic monument since 2012.²⁰