Army of the North (France)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Army of the North was not a single force but a name that France returned to again and again across nearly a century of war. It first appeared on the 14th of December 1791, when the Kingdom of France appointed a commander to a brand new army tasked with defending the country's vulnerable northern frontier. What followed over the next few years was a story of astonishing battlefield swings, revolutionary terror visited upon the army's own generals, and ultimate triumph that wiped the Dutch Republic from the map. The name would resurface during Napoleon Bonaparte's desperate campaigns in Spain, reach its apex as the finest force he had led since the Grande Armée marched into Russia in 1812, and appear one final time during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, when a new Army of the North tried and failed to lift the Prussian siege of Paris. What kept pulling France back to this name? And what did the soldiers who carried it actually face on those northern battlefields?

• 2. Terror at the Top

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  Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, was the man France chose to lead its first Army of the North in December 1791. He lasted only until May 1792, when he was replaced and retired from service. The new revolutionary government then charged him with treason. He barely escaped the guillotine. His near-execution was not an isolated incident. In the years between 1792 and 1794, commanders who failed in battle, who belonged to the nobility, or who simply failed to project enough revolutionary enthusiasm faced death. Three generals of the Army of the North fell into this category: Nicolas Luckner, Adam Custine, and Jean Houchard. Houchard's case was particularly striking. He won the Battle of Hondshoote in September 1793, forcing the English to abandon the Siege of Dunkirk. The government arrested him anyway for failing to press his advantage after that victory and had him executed. The command list for this era reads like a casualty roll of its own. More than two dozen officers rotated through the top position during the army's existence, some holding command for only days at a stretch.

• 3. Valmy to Fleurus

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  Charles François Dumouriez was commanding the Army of the North when Prussian forces pushed into French territory in the summer of 1792. On the 20th of September 1792, the army played a central role at the Battle of Valmy, blunting the Prussian advance. Less than two months later, on the 6th of November 1792, Dumouriez led the army in a push into the Austrian Netherlands, winning at the Battle of Jemappes. These victories gave way to a brutal string of reverses. On the 18th of March 1793, Austrian forces defeated Dumouriez at the Battle of Neerwinden. His successor Auguste Dampierre was killed in combat on the 8th of May at the Battle of Raismes, near Valenciennes. The next commander, François Joseph Drouot de Lamarche, lost at the Battle of Famars on the 23rd of May. The army's fortunes turned again in 1794. On the 17th and the 18th of May, the army won at the Battle of Tourcoing under the temporary command of Joseph Souham. Then on the 26th of June, the right wing of the army fought under Jean-Baptiste Jourdan at the Battle of Fleurus, a victory with enormous consequences. The Allied position in Flanders collapsed in its wake. Austria lost Belgium. The Dutch Republic ceased to exist in the winter of 1794-1795. On the 25th of October 1797, the Army of the North was formally dissolved, its surviving troops redeployed as an army of occupation in the newly established Batavian Republic.

• 4. Spain and the Guerrilla War

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  By January 1811, France was deep into the Peninsular War, and a new Army of the North took shape in Spain. Its tasks were unglamorous: garrison duty in northern Spanish cities and fortresses, escorting supply columns, clearing roads to France, and fighting the persistent guerrilla forces that made the countryside dangerous. Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bessières commanded it from the start. At the Battle of Fuentes de Onoro in early May 1811, roughly 1,600 cavalry and six artillery pieces from the army took part in the fighting over three days. A month and a half later, a 1,500-man detachment was beaten by Spanish forces at Cogorderos in the province of León on the 23rd of June. That defeat mattered because it kept the army from supporting the broader fight against Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and his Anglo-Portuguese Army. The force's contribution shrank steadily. By the Battle of Vitoria in June 1813, only 800 men from the Army of the North were present. After the catastrophic defeat at Vitoria, the army was absorbed into a reorganized Army of Spain and ceased to exist as a separate entity.

• 5. Napoleon's Best Army

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  Napoleon Bonaparte gave the name Armée du Nord to the force he assembled for the Waterloo Campaign of 1815, and by most measures it deserved the title. At its peak strength, including reserves, it numbered 130,000 men, many of them veterans of earlier campaigns. Napoleon himself assessed it as the finest army he had commanded since leading the Grande Armée into Russia in 1812, which had ended in catastrophe. Compared to the French armies of 1813 and 1814, this force fielded proportionally more artillery, 344 pieces in total, and significantly more cavalry. The army's two wings carried their own names: the Aile Gauche and the Aile Droite, left and right respectively. Marshal Ney commanded the left wing and Marshal Grouchy the right, each acting independently when Napoleon was not personally directing them. One persistent misunderstanding about the 1815 campaign is worth clearing up. The Armée de la Réserve, the Reserve Army, is often treated as a separate force that fought alongside the Armée du Nord. In fact the Reserve Army was simply a large corps within the Armée du Nord that Napoleon kept under his own direct control throughout the campaign.

• 6. Faidherbe's Last Stand

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  Louis Faidherbe inherited the fourth and final Army of the North during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, and his mission was to break the Prussian siege of Paris from the north. For a time the strategy worked on a small scale. The army won a series of limited engagements at towns including Ham, La Hallue, and Amiens, making use of the belt of fortresses across northern France to strike at isolated Prussian units and then pull back to safety. Faidherbe also had access to the armaments factories of Lille, a significant logistical advantage. Supply problems proved crippling anyway, and they wore down morale throughout the ranks. In January 1871, Léon Gambetta overruled Faidherbe's caution and ordered the army out from behind its fortresses to fight the Prussians in open country. The army was in no condition for it. Morale was low, supplies were thin, the winter weather was severe, and the quality of the troops was poor. Faidherbe himself was too ill to command effectively, the long-term toll of decades of campaigning in West Africa. At the Battle of St. Quentin, the Army of the North suffered a crushing defeat and broke apart. The defeat freed thousands of Prussian soldiers to redeploy elsewhere, with direct consequences for the wider course of the war.