Wawro G. The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871

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63The Armies in 1870

Fig. 1. Prussian cavalry scout reports to a ﬁeld headquarters, 1870

own horses and splendid uniforms, the price of admission to an elite cav-

alry regiment. Thus, Prussia’s free provision of horses had another salutary,

perhaps unintended effect; it made Prussian ofﬁcers fearless, “whereas,” as

Captain Hozier put it, “an English ofﬁcer who has paid 200 guineas for his

horse is not.”

As in so many other areas, the French saw the changes in cavalry warfare,

but did not adjust. France’s cavalry went to war in 1870 almost exactly as it had

in 1859, in massed, gaily uniformed heavy squadrons. Whereas the Prussians

kept just eight regiments of cuirassiers in 1870, the French had twelve. They

would have had even more had Niel not dissolved forty-two heavy squadrons

as a cost-saving measure during his short tenure at the war ministry. The

problem was compounded by the “heaviness” of France’s supposedly “light”

dragoon and lancer regiments. The lancers were more unwieldy than Prus-

sian uhlans, and the French dragoons prided themselves on looking just

like cuirassiers, a senseless preoccupation. One of the few changes that the

French cavalry did make suggested that they were on the wrong track any-

way. In 1868, they stripped the breastplates off of their cuirassiers, sold the

surplus equipment to Brazil, and procured thicker, heavier armor for the

reserve cavalry. Confronted with enhanced ﬁrepower, the French heavies

70 PRO, FO 64, 703, Versailles, 24 Oct. 1870, Capt. Henry Hozier.

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64 The Franco-Prussian War

were determined to ride right through it.

An Austro-Hungarian general

staff ofﬁcer who watched the Prussian army maneuvers at Glogau as well

as the French maneuvers at Ch

alons in 1869 noted a remarkable difference

in the two armies’ use of cavalry. Whether reconnoitering or attacking, the

Prussian horse moved briskly and efﬁciently; the French cavalry in contrast

“were even sloppier and more machine-like than the infantry and artillery.”

They patrolled and skirmished “very badly,” and even executed their spe-

cialty, massed attacks in two or more rows, in a “weak and feeble manner,”

and rarely accelerated beyond a trot to avoid disorganizing their regimental

fronts.

Inadequately trained and equipped as a scouting force and all but

useless as a reserve force because of the two-and-a-half-mile range of modern

guns, the unreformed French cavalry would prove a tragically wasted asset in

1870.

71 “Aus dem Lager von Ch

alons,”

OMZ 3 (1868), p. 77.

72 Capt. Ernst Schmedes, “Franz

osische Man

over zu Ch

alons,”

OMZ 2 (1869), pp. 19–20.

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Mobilization for War

Having voted war credits on 15 July, France formally declared war on Prus-

sia four days later. The declaration detonated explosions of patriotic feeling

in Paris. The mass demonstrations before Emile Ollivier’s h

otel on the Place

Vend

ome, General Jean-Baptiste Montaudon nervously watched. Having de-

clared war in the Corps L

egislatif, Ollivier was the man of the hour; he rel-

ished the attention, periodically appear on his balcony to wave to the surging

crowds. In Paris, troops were mobbed as they marched to the eastern station.

Civilian bystanders pressed in on them from all sides and joined their ranks,

shouldering packs and riﬂes, standing drinks at sidewalk caf

es, and bellowing

“

a Berlin!

A bas les prussiens!” Citizens thronged the Tuileries Palace day

and night waiting for their Napoleon to ride out and take command of the

army. The French provinces were at least as excited. Troops rolling to the

front in railcars recalled that even remote train stations were crowded with

spectators yelling encouragement, shoving ﬂasks of wine through the win-

dows, and enjoining the men to rout the “German blockheads” – “t

etes carr

allemands.”

French expectations ran high, and for Louis-Napoleon’s troops everything

turned on the speed with which they could deploy to the frontiers. Although

the French would eventually be outnumbered by the Prussians, they would

have several weeks in which to strike with their long-service regulars before

Prussia could collect its reserves. Whereas the Prussians brought their regi-

ments up to strength in the permanent corps districts and then transported

them to the front, the French rushed whatever they had to hand in each of

their 120 regimental and battalion depots to the front and only later completed

1 Munich, Bayerisches Kriegsarchiv (BKA), HS 888, Landwehr Lieut. Joseph Dunziger,

“Kriegstagebuch der Jahre 1870–71.” Gen. Jean-Baptiste Montaudon, Souvenirs Militaires,

2 vols., Paris, 1898–1900, vol. 2, pp. 56–7.

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66 The Franco-Prussian War

the units with reservists and men returning from leave. Though the French

approach was fraught with problems – how would reservists and men on fur-

lough actually reach their units in the chaos of mobilization? – it did confer

a powerful advantage on the French in the ﬁrst days of the war.

The French

also assumed that the Prussians would have to make big detachments to the

North Sea and Baltic coasts (to defend against French marine landings) and

Lower Silesia (to defend against an Austrian “war of revenge”).

Initially, then, the odds were in France’s favor. French general staff ofﬁcers

estimated that most of their infantry could be deployed to the theater of

war within fourteen days, whereas the Prussians would need seven weeks to

assemble their reserves and allied contingents. “Not a man has moved yet,”

General Leboeuf’s military secretary told a British visitor on 10 July, “but the

army can be concentrated on the German frontier in a fortnight.”

Here was

the French army’s principal strength: its ability to improvise, to slap together

large forces on short notice and ship them off to war. This so-called syst

eme

D – “on se d

ebrouillera toujours” (“one always muddles through somehow”) –

had been consecrated (and raised to new heights of reckless efﬁciency) by

Napoleon III’s uncle, who had habitually stolen a march on his enemies by

lunging across their borders and collecting men and supplies on the move.

Just such a rolling, marauding French advance was what the Germans

feared most. Passing through the Bavarian Palatinate a couple of days after

the French declaration of war, a Prussian ofﬁcer reported that the same wor-

ried question was on every peasant’s lips: “Ei, komme se denn endlich?”–

“hey, when will the French get here?”

Lieutenant Richard Ris, a Badenese

guardsman, noted that his regiment deployed itself defensively behind the

Rhine from 16–26 July to stop the French invasion that everyone assumed

was imminent. Ris recalled frantic hours digging trenches and demolishing

the railway bridge at Kehl to slow the French thrust.

German worries were

groundless, for Napoleon III was not prosecuting the war with anything like

the vigor of Napoleon I.

To begin with, Louis-Napoleon had no plan. During the Luxembourg

affair of 1867, Marshal Niel had proposed a hasty French invasion of Prussia

along the line Thionville-Luxembourg-Trier, a plan that had made perfect

sense, gathering as it did French troops in an area of good rail connections

and fortiﬁcations and thrusting them like a knife on to the open ground

between Prussia and the south German states. Unfortunately, in the sleepy

atmosphere of the Second Empire d

epot de guerre, Niel’s idea was never

2 Graf Alfred von Waldersee, Denkw

urdigkeiten, 3 vols., Berlin, 1922, vol. 1, pp. 81, 85.

3 London, Public Record Ofﬁce (PRO), Foreign Ofﬁce (FO) 425, 95, Paris, 10 July 1870, Col.

Claremont to Lord Lyons. Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, orig. 1961, London,

1981,p.47.

4 G. von Bismarck, Kriegserlebnisse 1866 und 1870–71, Dessau, 1907,p.88.

5 Richard Ris, Kriegserlebnisse, Auerbach, 1911, pp. 11–13.

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67Mobilization for War

elaborated into a formal plan.

In 1868, General Charles Frossard, the darling

of the empress and the prince imperial’s tutor, had sketched a quite different

plan, this one purely defensive. Three French armies, bristling with Chassepot

riﬂes and mitrailleuses, would entrench at Strasbourg, Metz, and Ch

alons to

repel a Prussian invasion. In February 1870, after a visit to Paris by Austria’s

Field Marshal Archduke Albrecht, a Habsburg revanchist unaware of political

realities in the new state of Austria-Hungary, Napoleon III gave the Frossard

plan a bizarre twist. After uncritically accepting the archduke’s empty promise

that Austria-Hungary would join a war against Prussia, Napoleon III, guided

by General Barth

elemy Lebrun, divided his army into two halves. One was

placed defensively at Metz and the other was placed offensively at Strasbourg

in position to “liberate” south Germany jointly with the Austro-Hungarians.

Besides being militarily risky – the French army would be split by the barrier

of the Vosges Mountains – the Lebrun twist was based on ﬂawed assumptions.

Archduke Albrecht, Emperor Franz Joseph’s hoary old uncle and a veteran of

1866, hated the Prussians, but had little inﬂuence in the newly constitutional

and liberal Habsburg Monarchy, where ethnic Hungarians, eager to mend

fences with Bismarck not ﬁght him, dominated. There would, in all likelihood,

be no Austro-Hungarian invasion of Prussia or south Germany in 1870, hence

the French army was needlessly cut in two.

The plans – Niel’s, Frossard’s, and Lebrun’s – were really not plans at

all. They were rough sketches that did not ﬁll in the overarching aims and

intermediate objectives urgently needed by the gathering French army. To

conform with all three of the plans, Napoleon III broke his army into three

pieces, the Army of the Rhine under the emperor himself at Metz, I Corps

under Marshal Patrice MacMahon in Alsace, and VI Corps under Marshal

Franc¸ois Canrobert at Ch

alons. The detached corps of MacMahon and

Canrobert were really small armies, both with four divisions. And yet no

coherent plan of campaign existed; no measures had been taken to coordinate

the attacks of the Army of the Rhine and I Corps and bring VI Corps promptly

into play. Even General Leboeuf, the French war minister, exhibited a bafﬂing

ignorance as to the proper use of the army. On 25 July, as the deployments

ground forward, he told the British military attach

e in Paris that Canrobert’s

corps would remain at Ch

alons until the threat of a Prussian invasion through

Belgium had abated and only then would be pushed up to the Rhine.

Such

considerations made no sense, because this was 1870 not 1914; the French,

not the Prussians, were in the best position to strike ﬁrst.

On 28 July, Napoleon III rose, smoked what would be his last cigarette

on his favorite perch above the gardens of St. Cloud, and then made his way

down to the imperial train, accompanied by his fourteen-year-old son and his

6 H. Sutherland Edwards, The Germans in France, London, 1873,p.19.

7 PRO, FO 425, 96,#119, Paris, 25 July 1870, Col. E. S. Claremont to Lord Lyons.

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68 The Franco-Prussian War

quarrelsome cousin Jer

ome, for the journey to Metz where he would dramat-

ically place himself at the head of the Army of the Rhine. By now, just ten

days into the war and before the ﬁghting had even begun, Napoleon III must

have been beginning to regret his bellicosity in the matter of Prince Leopold

Hohenzollern. The patriotic fury of the French masses had already begun

to ebb away, replaced by skepticism and the ﬁrst signs of discouragement.

Parisians greeted the emperor’s appointment of his wife as regent coldly. In-

deed to ward off popular upheaval, Napoleon III was forced to leave 15,000

sorely needed troops behind in the capital and submit his wife’s nomination

to the legislative body with the stipulation that she would neither initiate nor

amend any legislation in the emperor’s absence.

Even the empress, as reac-

tionary as they came, was appalled by the emperor’s unseasonable choice

of garrison commandant for Paris: seventy-ﬁve-year-old Marshal Achille

Baraguay d’Hilliers, the dodderer who had destroyed Giuseppe Mazzini’s

Roman Republic in 1849, connived in the coup of 1851, and now seemed fully

prepared to destroy Paris in case of popular risings against the war or the

emperor.

Napoleon III’s high command was also deeply divided. Although he had

no real military experience, Louis-Napoleon insisted on personally leading

France’s principal army into battle. Critics ascribed nefarious motives to the

emperor. He needed to appear at the head of his troops to take personal credit

for any victories. The Arm

ee du Rhin was his Grande Arm

ee, a means of

linking himself in the public mind with his more storied uncle. He feared

Marshals Bazaine and MacMahon, who might gain too much stature from a

French victory and eclipse the Bonapartes altogether.

Probably all of these

musings inﬂuenced the emperor, which may explain the bizarre construction

of his headquarters staff. France’s leading soldiers – Bazaine, MacMahon, and

Canrobert – were exiled to outlying corps while the emperor himself presided

at imperial headquarters with General Leboeuf, now Marshal Leboeuf, as his

major g

eral and Generals Lebrun and Jarras as his aides-majors-g

eraux.

The hastily invented posts of “major general” and “assistant major gen-

eral” hinted at the emperor’s panic. Desperate to piece together a high com-

mand without involving France’s most celebrated marshals, Louis-Napoleon

needed some formal means to subordinate senior ofﬁcers like Bazaine and

MacMahon to relative neophytes like Leboeuf and Lebrun. The “major gen-

eralcy” accomplished this, but at a great cost. Bazaine, already angry with the

emperor for making him the scapegoat for the failed Mexican expedition of

the 1860s, was cut to the quick. Expecting an army in 1870, he received a corps

8 Washington, DC, National Archive (NA), CIS, U.S. Serial Set, 1780, Paris, 29 July 1870,

Washburne to Fish.

9 PRO, FO 425, 96,#178, 28 July 1870, Col. E.S. Claremont to Lord Lyons.

10 Col. Joseph Andlau, Metz: Campagne et N

egociations, Paris, 1872,p.8.

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69Mobilization for War

instead, and, according to Colonel Joseph Andlau, one of Bazaine’s staff of-

ﬁcers, “complained bitterly to everyone that he had been humiliated.” Even

more signiﬁcant, in view of subsequent developments, was Bazaine’s com-

plaint that the emperor had “ignored [the marshal’s] political importance.”

Andlau would later acribe Bazaine’s refusal to ﬁght his way out of Metz to

relieve the emperor at Sedan to the hurt feelings of July.

Arriving at Metz late in the day on 28 July, Napoleon III repaired to his

headquarters in the Hotel de l’Europe to discover yet more bad news: Thirty

anonymous letters from soldiers in the French army accusing virtually ev-

ery one of his marshals and generals of cruelty, treason, or incompetence.

Leboeuf, who carried the letters to the emperor, never forgot their dispiriting

contents, and recalled that many were written not by disgruntled conscripts,

but by fellow French ofﬁcers. After leaﬁng through the letters, the emperor

slumped in the heat of the early evening. Charles Fay, a colonel in the em-

peror’s entourage, recalled the “stiﬂing, crushing warmth” in the cramped

dining room that had been hastily converted to army headquarters, and the

curious mood of helplessness. Marshal Leboeuf, who had grandly assured the

legislative body in March 1870 that he was “not just sitting with his arms

crossed,” but was drafting plans to “hurl forces to the [German] frontier and

carry the war to the enemy before he can carry it to us,” now found him-

self sitting with his arms crossed, awaiting a Prussian invasion.

The three

doors to the dining room continually swung open and slammed shut; couriers

dashed in, shouted their messages and dashed out, adding to the headaches and

perplexity within. Outside headquarters, the corridors and lobby of the Hotel

de l’Europe swarmed with journalists, tourists, and gawkers, who plucked at

the emperor and his marshals whenever they stepped out for a breath of air

or a cigarette. “It was under these conditions,” Leboeuf bitterly noted, “that

France embarked on the war.”

Later that evening, Napoleon III invited Marshal Achille Bazaine to the

imperial headquarters for an informal discussion of the war. That meeting, a

chilly affair, portended trouble between the emperor and his chief ﬁeld com-

mander. Sixty years old in 1870, Bazaine was the most celebrated general in

France. The son of a Versailles engineer, he had ﬂunked the entrance exam

to the Ecole Polytechnique as a young man, enlisted in the army, and strug-

gled through the ranks. A private at age twenty, Bazaine was a colonel by

thirty-nine, a general at forty. None of this was due to nepotism, the route of

many Napoleonic ofﬁcers. Bazaine had earned his stars the hard way, always

leading from the front. He had organized successful counter-insurgencies in

11 Andlau, Metz, pp. 8–9.

12 Journal Ofﬁciel de l’Empire Franc¸ais, 24 March 1870.

13 Vincennes, Service Historique de l’Arm

ee de Terre (SHAT), Lb 14, “Extrait de la deposition

de Ml. Le Boeuf devant le conseil d’enquete.”

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70 The Franco-Prussian War

North Africa and Mexico, had taken Fort Kinburn in the Crimean War, had

commanded divisions at Sebastopol and Solferino, and had been wounded

twice, ﬁrst in Algeria and then in Italy. In 1863, Bazaine had been dispatched

to Mexico to shore up the faltering command of Marshal Fr

ederic Forey.

More accolades awaited him there. He replaced Forey, defeated a Mexican

ﬁeld army, and took Mexico City. By 1864, Bazaine was a folk hero in France,

a bourgeois risen from the enlisted ranks to conquer an exotic, faraway coun-

try. He was made a Marshal of France that year and ordered to complete the

“paciﬁcation” of Mexico so that Archduke Maximilian of Austria, a French

client, could be seated on the throne of the “Mexican Empire.”

At the peak of his fame and power, Bazaine’s career began to unravel be-

tween 1864 and 1866. Although the marshal organized an effective counter-

insurgency, he could never totally eradicate the roving guerrillas of Benito

Juarez, whose strategy was simply to prolong the war and wait the French

out. By 1866, Juarez’s strategy paid off; appalled by the mounting cost of the

“Mexican adventure,” the French legislative body demanded that Napoleon

III abandon it. He did so in December 1866, ordering Bazaine and the troops

home (and leaving poor Archduke Maximilian in the lurch.) When Bazaine

returned to French soil with the last troop transport in March 1867, he made

an infuriating discovery. To deﬂect blame for Mexico from the Bonapartes,

Napoleon III had blamed Bazaine (subtly, discreetly, through cabinet mem-

bers and the press), an insult that the marshal never forgot or forgave. After

giving Bazaine leave (and a lovely provincial chateau to enjoy it in), Napoleon

III attempted to win back the marshal, giving him command of III Corps

(Nancy) in 1868–69 and the

elite Guard Corps in 1870. None of these at-

tempts at reconciliation worked; when war broke out in July, Bazaine still

burned with resentment at the way he had been treated three years earlier.

Napoleon III’s rough treatment of Bazaine in July 1870 only exacerbated

the situation. As Bazaine was the senior marshal at Metz, Napoleon III gave

him temporary command of all units in Lorraine until the emperor’s arrival

on 28 July. However, the command of what amounted to nineteen divisions

of infantry and cavalry was conferred with an explicit ban on “initiatives of

any kind without orders from Paris.” Adding insult to injury, Napoleon III

dispatched Leboeuf and Lebrun to Metz on 24 July and formally subordinated

Bazaine, France’s most popular marshal, to Leboeuf, “major g

eral” in name,

but number ten on the army’s seniority list of generals, far below Bazaine, who

was near the top of the marshals’ list. The blow to Bazaine’s pride was, as an

onlooker put it, “annihilating . . . it could scarcely have been possible to insult

a man more completely.”

14 Gen. Charles Fay, Journal d’un ofﬁcier de l’Arm

ee du Rhin, Paris, 1889, pp. 37–8. Andlau,

Metz,p.11.

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71Mobilization for War

Fig. 2. Bazaine in Mexico

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72 The Franco-Prussian War

This, then, was Bazaine’s frame of mind when he entered the Hotel de

l’Europe to confer with Napoleon III, Leboeuf, and Lebrun in the warm

evening hours of 28 July. Already irritated, Bazaine became more so when

pressed by Lebrun, Leboeuf, and the emperor for “suggestions” for a plan

of campaign against Prussia. Bazaine predictably had nothing to suggest. He

had always been a “muddy boots general,” not a strategist, and now saw no

reason to assist the major g

eral or the emperor, who had cut him after

Mexico. Tired and out of sorts, Bazaine stared blankly at his interlocutors.

According to General Louis Jarras, a witness to the scene, the mood was

cold and stilted, not at all conducive to the urgent brainstorming that was

required.

The Franco-Prussian military balance in late July was exceedingly delicate.

France had 150,000 troops grouped along the borders of the Prussian Rhine

provinces and the Bavarian Palatinate; the Prussians had as many men packed

into a rough square formed by the Saar and the Lauter in the south, the Moselle

in the west, and the Rhine in the north and east. Both armies were well-served

by railways, but neither would have an easy time attacking the other. A French

attack across the Rhine would expose its ﬂanks to the big Prussian garrisons

at Mainz and Rastatt; the Prussians faced similiar problems. If they passed

the Rhine above Strasbourg, they would slam into the best part of the French

army assembled around Metz. If they passed beneath Strasbourg, they would

run up against the Vosges Mountains, a signiﬁcant natural obstacle that might

shatter their tactical unity. No wonder Napoleon III and his staff pressed

Bazaine for answers; the war would unquestionably begin as a series of linked

strategic movements with the Prussians trying to break into Alsace-Lorraine,

and the French into the Rhineland or Franconia.

Someone in the French

headquarters needed to mark the way forward, but no one did.

One of the more intriguing documents in the French archives is a letter

from Marshal Patrice MacMahon to Leboeuf on 27 July requesting a meeting

at Strasbourg or Metz “to decide whether [I Corps] will take new positions

on the lower Rhine, or remain in its present position.”

MacMahon clearly

wanted to do something with the French army, but was ignored. More ad-

ministrators than strategists, Leboeuf and Lebrun chose a purely defensive

course as the least troublesome one. They would mass the Army of the Rhine

in Lorraine and let the Prussians come at them. Empress Eug

enie gave power-

ful support to this attitude. In a private meeting with the Austrian ambassador

on 31 July, she conﬁded that “France will prolong the war, convert it into a

15 “Marschall Bazaine und die Rhein-Armee von 1870,” Allgemeine Milit

arische Zeitung 46

(1892), p. 363.

16 SHAT, Lb3, “Renseignements,” L’Ind

ependance Belge, 31 July 1870.

17 SHAT, Lb1, Strasbourg, 27 July 1870, Marshal MacMahon to Marshal Leboeuf.