“This unfortunate man so afflicted with pain, and scarcely
able even to cope with the daily affairs of State in peacetime, was
now called upon to direct a full-scale war!” 1
—MAXIME DU CAMP ON NAPOLÉON III
On the warm summer’s morning of Friday, July 28, 1870, a sixty-two-year-old Louis Napoléon, with the Imperial Prince, his fourteen-year-old son Louis, both in military uniform, took leave of Empress Eugénie at the small private station at Villeneuve-l’Etang near St. Cloud and boarded the six-car train that would take them and the imperial staff to war. “It is better to die than live without honor,” Eugénie afterward wrote her mother, although even Princess Mathilde2 had implored her that the ailing Napoléon III was hardly fit to take a long journey across France, let alone command an army on a battlefield.
The severe pain caused by the advanced state of his gallstone—his doctors having urgently advised exploratory surgery earlier that month—should have been reason enough for his not assuming personal command of the army. The by now daily problem of incontinence, the total lack of urinary control caused by the pressure of the stone, would be aggravated by a long journey aboard a primitive train and later by hours in jolting carriages and on horseback with the troops. It would also prove most embarrassing for him and his staff. To Eugénie, however, the state of his health was quite irrelevant. He was the Emperor and must think of his position! She would have been humiliated had he not led his men on the battlefield. “That is the man you are sending to war!” an appalled Mathilde had said, pointing to her shrunken cousin, who needed the assistance of his son to board the train.3 As Louis Napoléon himself had explained to the country on the nineteenth, “There are solemn moments in the life of a people when an outraged sense of national honor becomes an irresistible force, overwhelming everyone and ends in dictating the very destinies of the country. Just such a decisive hour has now struck in France.”4
Although War Minister Marshal Leboeuf had reassured him that the army was “ready for anything,” Louis Napoléon had taken nothing for granted and had been negotiating for several months to engage the support of two allies, Austria and Italy. As late as mid-July he had dispatched cousin Prince Jérôme to Florence, the current capital of the newly unified Italy, to seal this critical pact that would provide, at the very least, an armed neutrality including a strong Italian army along her northern frontier, and an Austrian army along the Austro-German border. Moltke would be obliged to divide his forces. Louis Napoléon’s foolish hesitation in withdrawing French forces from Rome, as demanded by Victor Emmanuel, had killed any hope of an early Italian signature to such a pact. Austria and Italy instead now decided to wait and observe events as those hostilities broke out before committing themselves.5
* * *
Louis Napoléon and his staff reached the new railway station at Metz late on the twenty-eighth, where he assumed supreme command of the Army of the Rhine. “Soldiers—I am about to place myself at your head to defend the honor and soil of the country,” he told the troops on his arrival, reminding them that “nothing is impossible for the soldiers of Africa, the Crimea, Italy and Mexico.” The eyes of France and the world were on them, therefore “let every man do his duty, and the God of battle will be with us.” But what Louis Napoléon found upon his arrival at Metz on the twenty-eighth of July, where the main part of the army was forming, came as a shock, even as Bismarck was lambasting the French in the German press for having “deliberately and unjustly provoked this war!”6
Louis Napoléon’s army today had neither an experienced, capable chief of staff, nor a professional general staff. Nothing had changed since the Crimea, and the foul-ups were now repeated. In a subsequent report Louis Napoléon recorded in the third person what he now found: half of most regiments lacked even basic muskets and munitions, and most of them “had not even been drilled in the use of the new arms,” including the excellent Model 1866 chassepot breech-loading rifles. The same applied to the newly manufactured grapeshot machine guns, or Reffye Mitrailleuses, capable of spewing out 100 balles a minute.7 In fact only a few dozen French officers were instructed in the use of the 190 machine guns currently available for the entire French army, and even these few were treated more like rifles for short-range use. As for the much vaunted French artillery, it still remained the same muzzle-loading bronze cannon that had been used at Waterloo in 1815. Moltke, on the other hand, had the faster firing, longer ranged (four miles), far more accurate and destructive new steel 6.6-pound Krupp breech-loading guns.
Although no army could be expected to win a victory over his enemy without a well-prepared war plan, to his dismay Louis Napoléon now found in 1870 that his utterly incompetent Marshal Leboeuf had in fact prepared no such plan. France was going to launch a war and had no precise objective. Louis Napoléon did not know where he was going or what to do—apart from killing Prussians. In fact every phase of French preparation for this new campaign was woefully inadequate, including the missing encampments for the anticipated 400,000 men expected here. Thousands of tents were missing, and as for field kitchens …
Unlike Marshal Leboeuf’s “general staff,” Moltke’s had a special deputy staff just to prepare all the railway schedules well in advance of collecting and transporting troops, munitions, and supplies quickly to the French frontier. When Prussian troops arrived, they would find everything in readiness, including well-designated bivouacs and field kitchens. Moreover, Moltke and his senior officers had visited the anticipated battlefields over the preceding months and years, unlike most of the French marshals and senior generals from Algeria, who were totally unfamiliar with the topography of French Alsace and Lorraine, not to mention adjacent southwestern Germany. As for their equipment, Louis Napoléon discovered that everything was “still stacked, chiefly [in the warehouses] at Vernon and Satori,” while the army’s entire medical supplies were at the Invalides in Paris, but not here.8 Someone had neglected to ship them. Sending an additional ten thousand troops to Metz, for instance, required enormous provisions of food stores, but nothing had been anticipated, obliging the entire army corps to “live off the land,” as Napoléon had done in Russia—multiply this forty-fold, and the campaign before them was an impending disaster waiting to happen. Even staff officers at best had maps dating back to the First Empire, that is, not even indicating the rail network, improved roads, and new canals.
Thus tired, disgruntled troops, thrown together on what trains that could be found at the last minute, arrived at Metz, where nothing was ready for them. Instead of having well-fed men, enthusiastic about advancing into Germany, Marshal LeBoeuf presented a disorganized, unprepared, untrained army, where the demoralized troops’ anger was vented not against the enemy, but against their own commanding officers. Men without tents, food, arms, or hope. A general staff straight from Algeria, without even a general campaign or battle plan or accurate, up-to-date maps. Confusion was rife, and hungry recruits and veterans alike turned surly, defiant, and brazenly disobedient. Such was the situation Louis Napoléon encountered at Metz on Friday, the twenty-eighth of July, a fortnight after the orders had been issued to mobilize the French Imperial Army. That day he must have known that the war was lost.
* * *
On reaching Metz Louis Napoléon had expected to see the 350,000 troops and 100,000 Gardes Mobiles as announced by War Minister Marshal Leboeuf. Instead he found a total of only 220,000 unorganized, unfed troops, “the most striking and deplorable proof of the failings in our own military organization,” he admitted. But this, of course, was superseded by his own even greater personal “failing” in having declared war on Prussia without even having a “war plan” ready to put into execution.
What was the war’s objective? To march on Berlin? To remove King Wilhelm I from the throne? To replace Bismarck, Moltke, and the government? To defeat and destroy the Prussian army and occupy Prussia? In fact neither Louis Napoléon, his war minister, nor army commanders had a primary objective. They were angry about Bismarck’s political bravado and crude insults, and had responded by declaring war. It was utter madness, irresponsibility at the highest level. And of course then there was the little matter of a nonexistent war plan. Ultimately Louis Napoléon would be mobilizing more than half a million men without knowing what he wanted to do with them.9
* * *
Marshal Niel’s original 1868 “war plan,” a nebulous offensive against “Germany,” had been set aside by Marshal Leboeuf, replaced with an ill-defined ad hoc defensive campaign, that is, for the army remaining in France to protect the nation from an invasion wherever that happened to occur. How this was to be achieved Leboeuf failed to say, only that close to 500,000 troops would be divided into two forces, the Army of the Rhine, at Metz, and the Army of Alsace, at Strasbourg, while the inexperienced reserves would be called up and ordered to assemble at Châlons-sur-Marne (in Champagne). But to where exactly, to link up with the armies at Metz and Strasbourg? The clamor by the French press—including the Le Gaulois, Le Figaro, La Presse, Le Temps, and Le Siècle10—and by an assembly of deputies demanding action, roused by the equally impatient boisterous crowds in the streets of Paris singing the revolutionary “Marseillaise” and “Le Chant des Girodins,” and calling for a march on Berlin, had rattled an unprepared Louis Napoléon, forcing him to act, as he quite frankly acknowledged.
As the well-respected insider and homme des lettres Maxime Du Camp now witnessed, even the dovish premier, Ollivier, had overnight become “the bellicose soul incarnate of the Gaul warrior of our ancestors,” demanding blood. Indeed “it is in the very nature of the Frenchman to prick up his ears at the first sound of the tambour,” Du Camps added, “and to tremble with patriotic fervor when the bugles sound out calling the nation to arms.”11 And when that author, who had just returned from Prussia and seen the extensive war preparations there, expressed his doubts about an inevitable French victory, he was sharply rebuked by the super patriot Premier Ollivier himself, he who had just weeks earlier denied the army an increased budget and reserves. “You really do not love your country!” he said turning on Du Camp. “It is a crime to ever lose faith in your own country!… Prussia has already as good as lost the war, why we have only to reach out and take Berlin!”
* * *
On the thirty-first of July an impatient commander in chief Napoléon III ordered an unplanned attack from Metz across the German frontier at Saarbrücken. There on the second of August General Frossard’s II Corps and Marshal Bazaine’s III Corps easily overran the Prussian 40th Regiment (of the 16th Division). Total casualties: eighty-six French, against eighty-three Prussian. France had won its first “battle” of the war and, as it turned out, its last. “Seizing the offensive our army crossed the frontier and invaded Prussian territory,” Louis Napoléon proudly telegraphed Eugénie. “Louis has just come under his baptism of fire, and has kept a musket ball as a souvenir … he was remarkably calm throughout the fighting.”12
Paris was ecstatic.
* * *
Like Uncle Napoléon before him, Louis Napoléon had no permanent intelligence staff, relying instead on a few occasional advance patrols. There were no secret agents or paid informers in the Prussian camp, with the Prussian general staff, or even in the towns along their route. Thus rumors replaced serious intelligence reports. “The Prussians are coming!” was repeated, though no one had any idea exactly what force the combined Prussian North German Confederation or Bavarian armies actually had in the field or when and where they would reach the French frontier.
In fact three Prussian armies were closing in on northeastern France: Field Marshal Karl von Steinmetz’s First Army of 50,000 men around Saarlouis and Saarbrücken, Prince Friedrich Karl’s Second Army, 134,000 strong, around Forbach and Spicheren, and Crown Prince Friedrich’s Third Army of 120,000 descending on Wissembourg. There were also vague reports of a Bavarian force moving in from the southeast.
Meanwhile Louis Napoléon, in a great deal of pain from traveling over rough country roads, was in no state to lead anyone. Attempting to mount a horse, he nearly fainted and had to be helped into a carriage. With reports now coming in of heavy Prussian troop concentrations at Saarlouis, instead of driving ahead or digging in to prepare for the enemy while waiting for supplies, artillery, and reinforcements, it was decided to withdraw from Saarbrücken and retreat, but to where? They had no plans. After the first day’s fight, the French had suddenly lost any incentive to launch an offensive. No French army would be crossing into Germany during this war. Mentally the French had already surrendered. The army had men and guns, but it did not have leadership.
Louis Napoléon wrote Prime Minister Émile Ollivier that he had already given up any idea of a quick, short campaign like that fought earlier in Italy with Victor Emmanuel. “We must be prepared for a long war, since it is quite impossible to end it with one big knockout blow,” and, as he had warned his troops at the outset, “this is going to be a long and difficult war.” Uncle Napoléon had had his ill-conceived, indeed catastrophic, Egyptian, Spanish, and Russian campaigns, and Louis Napoléon now had one of his own in 1870.13
On the fourth of August, General Douay’s division at Wissembourg, part of a screening operation by Marshal MacMahon’s I Corps to intercept the advancing Prussians from the northeast, was attacked and defeated by units of one Bavarian and two Prussian corps of Crown Prince Friedrich’s powerful Third Army. Easily overwhelming the much smaller French force in a brief if fierce firefight in which General Abel Douay, the divisional commander, was killed, the French abandoned Wissembourg abruptly, after suffering 1,000 casualties. This was to prove to be but the first in a long series of French defeats and retreats. MacMahon’s retreating corps were next defeated by the Prussians on the sixth of August between Wörth and Froeschwiller, while General Frossard was attacked and defeated with a smaller force at Spichern (near Forbach). In a matter of days the incompetent MacMahon abandoned this entire northern part of Alsace, and at the end of September came the dramatic loss of Strasbourg, where another French soldier would not be seen in the streets again until nearly half a century later during the First World War. The enormity of this tragedy in progress was just beginning to be felt in Paris.
Moltke’s armies were now driving westward into Lorraine, as most of the French Army of the Rhine fell back to a very crowded and chaotic Metz, amid serious talk of a further withdrawal of the entire French army to Châlons-sur-Marne in order to protect Paris. All this less than a week after the first fighting had begun. At Metz on the seventh of August, most general officers refused to retreat any farther, however, while in Paris Eugénie as regent was convening a series of emergency privy council meetings with equally disastrous results. That same day War Minister Leboeuf offered to resign, and a dejected Louis Napoléon, feeling utterly useless, sent a telegram to Eugénie stating his intention of returning to the French capital. “Have you considered the consequences that would result from your returning to Paris with two defeats behind you!” Eugénie responded angrily. Louis Napoléon remained with the army.14
What he did not tell his wife, however, was just what a weak, depressed, and even suicidal state he was in. Earlier he had deliberately and repeatedly exposed himself to intensive Prussian fire, one of his aides-de-camp killed at his side and two others wounded, while he emerged without a scratch. His stone caused him such severe pain at times he nearly collapsed, as one member of his staff witnessed. “His face was ashen and he was doubled over in pain. The least jolting by his carriage would make him groan. He could only sit a horse at the cost of agonizing stabs of pain. On one occasion … he stopped, leaning his head against a tree, he so terribly tortured by the spasms of his bladder,” and even during meals he could be seen “shivering uncontrollably by the pain.” Twice a day “his surgeon tormented him with a catheter, as he could no longer urinate.”15 Louis Napoléon desperately wanted to die, but none of this was related to the empress in Paris, who simply condemned him as a coward. In the meantime he had sent his son Prince Louis to Belgium and on to the safety of an English exile.
* * *
All the while, however, Louis Napoléon continued to add to his long list of poor military judgments by now appointing the disastrous François Achille Bazaine, late of Mexico, to take command of the Army of the Rhine at Metz. He was the son of General Pierre Bazaine, one of Napoléon I’s favorite officers, but unlike his father he had washed out of the École Polytechnique. Thus began Bazaine’s slow career to the top, enrolling as a private and finally achieving a commission in Algeria in 1833, where he then spent many years. After briefly being seconded to Queen Christine’s Spanish army for a couple of years, Bazaine returned to Algeria, where in 1851 he was given command of the French Foreign Legion, followed by an unhappy marriage to a Spanish woman the following year. Next serving in Mexico, he had undermined Maximilian’s rule and lost battles. Astonishingly, Louis Napoléon awarded him a marshal’s baton in 1864, after which that soldier had served in both the Crimea and the campaign for Italian independence.
Bazaine duly assumed command of the Army of the Rhine on August 13, 1870, while yet another incompetent Algerian soldier, MacMahon, attempted to link up with the Army of Châlons, of which he had just been given command. “On the morning of the 14th the retreat began,” Louis Napoléon, an eyewitness to these events, explained, as they too headed west toward Verdun. But they were then “compelled to evacuate their quarters without warning,” he continued, as they came under direct enemy fire on the fifteenth “with part of the army at Gravelotte.” Cut off from all communication with Paris, however, it became imperative as head of state that the emperor get to Châlons as quickly as possible. Setting out at four o’clock on the morning of the sixteenth with an escort of two regiments of the Imperial Guard, Louis Napoléon reached Châlons later that evening.16
There the French emperor and MacMahon found Prince Jérôme, Eugène Rouher, and General Louis Trochu, as they discussed the situation in a war council. Back in Paris, betraying Napoléon III, Jules Favres and Leon Gambetta were actively fomenting a political revolution to overthrow the French government. The army had to act decisively against the Prussians if the Second Empire were to survive. Plon-Plon chaired the meeting and gave the orders, while a confused Louis Napoléon looked on. Jérôme insisted on General Trochu assuming command as military governor of Paris, and a dazed Louis Napoléon acquiesced as usual. Eugénie had convoked the Legislative Body in his absence and illegally removed Ollivier as prime minister, replacing him with Count de Palikao, General Charles Cousin-Montauban, who took over the portfolios as prime minister and minister for war.17 Moral authority no longer lodged with the army facing the Prussians; it had returned to the capital, as Louis Napoléon acknowledged. Action was required.
* * *
Marshal MacMahon was now given command of the entire French army, and a resigned Louis Napoléon, a broken man, agreed to follow it “whatever its destination might be,” as he put it. Crippled by pain, depression, and foreboding, Napoléon III was no longer in control of the government and events in Paris, or of his own army in the field. Indeed he only got through each day thanks to the attentions of Henri Conneau. At this moment, in effect, no one ruled France. As Louis Napoléon put it in the third person, he had been “shorn of the rights he held from the nation.… and watched as his army marched into an abyss before his very eyes!” He found himself “the powerless witness of a hopeless struggle,” and felt his “life and death to be quite irrelevant now,” as MacMahon directed the new Army of Châlons to link up with Bazaine’s Army of the Rhine, still at Metz.18
Back on the sixteenth, Bazaine had ordered Marshal François Canrobert’s VI Corps to reconnoiter the road between Metz and Verdun, which he found already partly occupied by the Prussians. Following a brisk skirmish at Mars-la-Tours that same day, Canrobert withdrew his veteran VI Corps to a stronger position between the forts of St. Quentin and Rozerieulles and St. Privat La Montagne (near Gravelottes), six miles from Metz. In good health at the age of fifty-nine, but looking ten years older with his massive head of thinning gray hair, the marshal took the high ground behind St. Privat, where he ordered his infantry and artillery—120,000 men—to dig in. On the eighteenth the Prussians, now at neighboring Gravelottes, moved in following Moltke’s plan for a coordinated pincer attack by Field Marshal Karl von Steinmetz’s First Army of some 50,000 and Prince Friedrich Karl’s Second Army of nearly 134,000 against Canrobert at St. Privat La Montagne.
Steinmetz, whose family had also fallen victim to Napoléon’s marauding Grand Army during the First Empire, had no more love of the French than did Bismarck himself, and now this gruff, impatient seventy-four-year-old soldier, disregarding Moltke’s order of battle, was determined to take matters into his own hands. Revenge has no age. At noon on the eighteenth of August, Steinmetz’s Krupp guns opened fire on Marshal Canrobert’s VI Corps who were well dug in on the wooded heights of St. Privat. Two and a half hours later, the Prussian commander launched his 50,000 men in a full-scale attack, which Canrobert’s single corps nevertheless twice successfully repulsed, forcing Marshal von Steinmetz’s much bloodied First Army to withdraw from the battlefield with very heavy casualties. The long dormant spirit of the Grand Army briefly flickered after an absence of five and a half decades.
Unlike the other Algerian veterans, Canrobert was now in his element, and he dispatched an aide-de-camp the six miles to Metz for urgent reinforcements and munitions from Marshal Bazaine. Considering the battle hopeless, however, Bazaine ignored the plea of a colleague in arms for help, refusing to send a single unit of his 100,000-man army, an army that could possibly have made the difference. Meanwhile Prince Friedrich Karl’s Second Army, 134,000 strong, reached St. Privat, replacing the routed Steinmetz on the battlefield. Short on food and munitions, exhausted after hours of fighting, and vastly outnumbered and outgunned, Canrobert nevertheless held his ground amid the burning buildings of that village. But as dusk settled after ten o’clock that evening, the guns of both sides gradually fell silent. Although still in place, the following morning, the nineteenth, Canrobert, now greatly outnumbered by a vastly superior force, and abandoned by a cowardly and incompetent Bazaine, had no choice but to fall back to Metz, and to a commanding officer he utterly despised. In this battle he had lost 12,175 killed and wounded, the Prussians 20,163. Completely surrounded by Moltke’s armies, Bazaine, after failing to cut a deal for himself with the Prussians, was to surrender Metz and his Army of the Rhine to them at the end of October. There would be a place in the Invalides reserved for the brave Canrobert, but only a prison cell for Bazaine.19
* * *
In the meantime, far to the west, Marshal MacMahon—this soldier who as governor general of Algeria had denounced Napoléon III and his recommendations for that colony in 1865—now in full command, like Canrobert earlier, found the road between Verdun and Metz still closed by the Prussians. MacMahon instead moved to the northeast via Reims, still hoping to link up with Bazaine. “I am bound to say—for justice demands it … that I and I alone ordered the movement [of the Army of Châlons] in the direction of Metz,” the sixty-two-year-old Patrice de MacMahon later stated for the historical record. (Louis Napoléon had privately been against it.) By the thirtieth of August, they found themselves on the heights of Mouzon with the twelfth corps, where they heard the distant guns of General de Failly. Units of the French army having been defeated at Beaumont on the thirtieth of August, MacMahon was intent on getting most of his Army of Châlons—120,000 strong—across to the right bank of the River Meuse.
MacMahon had wanted a by now physically disabled Napoléon III to proceed first to the safety of Carignan where V Corps had, he hoped, secured that village and established new general headquarters. Less than an hour later, however, General Ducrot suddenly arrived from there with news that the V Corps had been routed and was falling back helter-skelter to their position here at Mouzon. MacMahon decided to seek temporary shelter at Sedan, just six miles or so south of the Belgian frontier. Leaving his horses, carriages, and strong military escort of Guides behind, Louis Napoléon took the short train journey from Carignan to Sedan.20
* * *
Founded in the tenth century, Sedan by 1870 had a prosperous population of 14,000, protected beneath a towering rocky outcrop on which stood Vauban’s sprawling seventeenth-century fortified castle. In theory the place was well protected, with the hills to the north and east covered by an ancient, impenetrable forest of the Ardennes stretching all the way up into Belgium. To the west, the Meuse looped around Igey, forming a narrow peninsula. To the south Sedan and its citadel overlooked the River Meuse, whose swampy banks were of little use to infantry or cavalry, and moreover there was only one bridge from Donchery crossing the river directly before the entrance to Sedan. A few kilometers to the east, the only other bridge, built for the new Remilly-Aillicourt railway, crossed the Meuse at a point leading to the village of Bazeilles on the right bank. A panicked MacMahon rushed his disorganized army forward in some confusion, with two Prussian armies close on his heels. In his haste that French commander neglected the obvious, to have those two critical bridges blown up, and the Prussians would soon be streaming across them. If Sedan looked like a temporary staging or regrouping point before escaping to Mézières eighteen kilometers to the west, it was also immediately apparent that if bottled up here by the Germans, the entire army would be completely isolated, with no escape possible. The thoroughly incompetent MacMahon had failed to take that into consideration as well.
Opposing the French, Helmut von Moltke now personally took command of the III and IV Armies, some 200,000 troops and 774 pieces of artillery, as opposed to MacMahon’s paper strength of 120,000 men and 564 muzzle-loading guns. Having completely separated MacMahon’s Army of Châlons from Marshal Bazaine’s Army of the Rhine, surrounded by the Prussians at Metz some 150 kilometers (93 miles) away, Moltke now had MacMahon precisely where he wanted him, though he was unaware of the presence of Louis Napoléon here.
At four o’clock on the morning of the first of September, Bavarian units of the III Army began pouring over the railway bridge into the village of Bazeilles. MacMahon himself was one of the first victims, wounded near Balan two hours later while observing the fighting at nearby Bazeilles. He was briefly replaced by General Ducrot, before General Emmanuel Wimpffen now arrived to take over full command and cancel any orders for a retreat to the west. The Army of Châlons would stand and fight. Meanwhile, behind the massive stone walls of the citadel French artillery was in place, along with troops behind it forming a large circular perimeter facing Illy to the immediate north, Givonne to the east, Glaire to the west, and Floing to the north and northwest. To the northwest Prussia’s Wilhelm I and Field Marshal von Moltke, now joined by Bismarck from Berlin, established their general headquarters on a hill near the village of Frénois. Given this unique terrain, there was no large area either for the deployment of cavalry or large infantry formations except on the plateau before Illy. Geography dictated the parameters of battle.
The earliest and most persistent fighting continued in and around the by now much battered Bazeilles, where the Bavarians and a unit of the French marines fought back-and-forth in hand-to-hand battle to hold this village of a few hundred. By two o’clock there was also heavy fighting behind the fortress on the Plateau of Illy and at Floing, where General Jean Margueritte three times charged the Prussians with his Algerian Chasseurs, before being cut down. South of Sedan, the Prussian Third and Fourth Armies were continuing to cross the main Donchery bridge leading to the city center of Sedan. Any escape to Mézières and the west was quite impossible by now, as was flight to the north to Belgium. Thousands of MacMahon’s untrained reserve troops now fled the shelling of the plateau in complete confusion, pouring into the streets of Sedan below. There, congestion brought any real movement to a halt as horses, alive and dead, hundreds of carts, guns, caissons, and troops attempted to flee Moltke’s mortars and batteries of lethal Krupp artillery.
Louis Napoléon watched helplessly in Sedan, as a baffled MacMahon advanced from chaos to final disaster. Completely cut off from all sides and all directions, amid raining shells and now house-to-house fighting, and with major fires raging in various parts of Sedan, the French emperor described the situation before him. The troops, “having fought for twelve hours without rest or food,” were completely discouraged and “all those who had not been able to reach the town were now massed in the trenches and against the walls.… The time had come, a decision had to be made,” he explained. When there now remained the inevitable “death facing the remaining 80,0000 men,” as their sovereign “he could not let them be massacred under his very eyes.” Hemmed in on all sides, being pounded by a vastly superior artillery, their situation was hopeless. “The citadel as well as the streets [of Sedan] were gorged with soldiers who had taken refuge there,” but General Wimpffen failed to answer Louis Napoléon’s call for the hoisting of a white flag. Therefore, continuing his narrative in the third person, “the Emperor assumed the responsibility for raising the flag of truce.” He knew full well that he would later be accused by his critics for this action, but his only concern was for saving lives. Wimpffen immediately tendered his resignation; Louis Napoléon rejected it, reminding him “not to desert his post under these critical circumstances.” Louis Napoléon then sent a message to the Prussian king, Wilhelm I, “by which he placed his sword in his hands.” In fact until this point the Prussians had still been quite unaware of the presence of Napoléon III at Sedan.
“On the morning of September 2 Napoléon III”—he continued in the third person—“attended by the Prince de la Moskowa,” Marshal Ney’s son, along with Henri Conneau, “entered a carriage drawn by two horses to drive to the Prussian lines,” where General André Reille had been dispatched to notify Bismarck of his arrival. “As the portcullis of the south [Torcy] gate of Sedan was lowered [behind him], the [Algerian] zouaves saluted him with the cry of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’” When just a few miles from Donchery, “the Emperor stopped at a little roadside house there to await the arrival of the Chancellor.” Bismarck arrived shortly thereafter, stating that Moltke alone was empowered to answer any questions. Louis Napoléon explained he was there in his personal capacity, not as the ruler of France; he could surrender himself and the Army of Châlons, but not France. Only the regent, the ministers, and the chamber in Paris could open peace negotiations, he stated. When Field Marshal Moltke then arrived, Louis Napoléon insisted on speaking directly to Wilhelm I and no one else.
“A few minutes later the King of Prussia arrived on horseback, accompanied by the Prince Royal and a few officers.” The cordiality of their last meeting three years earlier, when Wilhelm was Louis Napoléon’s guest during his state visit to the Universal Exhibition in Paris, was effaced by the present circumstances. The king demanded an immediate cessation of all fighting, and “declared it was impossible to afford more favorable conditions to his army.” The entire Army of Châlons now surrendered, nearly 90,000 men remaining, along with Marshal MacMahon and more than thirty general officers, including Wimpffen and Ducrot. Louis Napoléon was informed that he was to be imprisoned at the palace of Wilhelmshöhe, near Cassel. “Then the Prince Royal advanced and shook him affectionately by the hand and in a quarter of an hour the King retired,” prisoner-of-war Louis Napoléon related before being placed under a strong Prussian military escort for the long journey to the northeast and Wilhelmshöhe. For Napoléon III the war was over on this second day of September 1870.21 He would never again see France. The cost of this one-day battle at Sedan: 17,000 French killed or wounded, opposed to 8,300 for the Prussians. With the loss of this last free French army and Bazaine refusing to fight, the road to Paris was wide open.