Battle of Brienne

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Brienne on the 29th of January 1814 took place at a site Napoleon knew intimately. He had entered the Royal School of Brienne as a boy of nine on the 23rd of April 1779 and studied there for five and a half years. Now he returned not as a student but as emperor, leading an army into a desperate gamble to save France itself.

  The stakes were enormous. Two Allied armies, initially numbering 300,000 men, had smashed through France's weak defenses in late December 1813 and were driving westward. Napoleon's goal was to strike Prussian Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher's force before it could unite with the main Allied army under Austrian field marshal Karl Philipp, Prince of Schwarzenberg. If he succeeded, he might arrest the invasion. If he failed, the combined Allied host would outnumber him by more than two to one.

  What followed that January day was a battle of close quarters, desperate charges, near-captures, and fighting that stretched far into the night. The château where Napoleon once studied became a prize seized by a few hundred French soldiers who nearly took the Prussian commander himself. Yet the tactical result would prove bitterly ambiguous, and the larger campaign it opened would end France's imperial era within months.

• 2. France at the Brink

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  November 1813 found France in a precarious position. Only 70,000 survivors of the disastrous German Campaign crossed back to the west bank of the Rhine River, and Napoleon left behind 100,000 French soldiers garrisoning German towns, trapped by enemy forces and hostile local populations. Every German ally had switched sides and joined the Sixth Coalition.

  The defensive picture elsewhere was just as thin. Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult commanded 60,000 men guarding the Spanish border. Marshal Louis Gabriel Suchet held 37,000 more at the same frontier. Napoleon's stepson Eugène de Beauharnais defended the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy with 50,000 troops against Austria. Garrisons were scattered across Belgium, the Netherlands, and eastern France. Another 15,000 soldiers sat isolated in Mainz alone.

  The Allied leaders gathered at Frankfurt-am-Main to coordinate their plan. Czar Alexander I of Russia and King Frederick William III of Prussia wanted Napoleon removed entirely. Emperor Francis I of Austria held back; Napoleon was his son-in-law, and Francis worried that crushing France would only strengthen his rivals Russia and Prussia. This tension shaped everything. Schwarzenberg followed his emperor's cautious policy. Blücher wanted to destroy Napoleon as quickly as possible. Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, crown prince of Sweden and a former French marshal, secretly wished to replace Napoleon as France's leader and was reluctant to invade his former homeland. Three coalition partners, three competing agendas, and one emperor to destroy.

• 3. The Armies Converge

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  On the 22nd of December 1813, elements of Schwarzenberg's force crossed the upper Rhine and pushed into France and Switzerland. Blücher crossed the middle Rhine on the 29th of December. Napoleon's cordon defense collapsed almost immediately. Victor abandoned Nancy. On the 13th of January 1814, Marmont retreated to Metz. By the 17th of January, Marmont, Ney, and Victor had all pulled back behind the Meuse River.

  Blücher's army covered 75 miles in nine days and crossed the Meuse on the 22nd of January. Schwarzenberg reached Langres on the 17th, then paused, incorrectly convinced that Napoleon was about to strike him with 80,000 troops. When Schwarzenberg finally moved again, Marshal Édouard Mortier's Imperial Guard slowed him through a series of rearguard actions. A clash at Bar-sur-Aube on the 24th of January pitted Mortier's guardsmen against two of Schwarzenberg's corps.

  Napoleon himself departed Paris on the 26th of January, leaving his brother Joseph Bonaparte in charge of the capital. He reached Châlons-sur-Marne the same day. Near Châlons, Marshal Claude Victor Perrin had 14,747 men; Marshal Auguste de Marmont commanded 12,051; Marshal Michel Ney directed 14,505 in three Young Guard infantry divisions. Napoleon ordered his army issued four days' rations and marched it toward Saint-Dizier, where he believed Blücher was positioned with roughly 25,000 soldiers and 40 guns. A cavalry clash at Saint-Dizier on the 27th of January saw Milhaud's 2,100 horsemen drive back 1,500 Russians under Sergey Nikolaevich Lanskoy. But Blücher had already moved southwest to Brienne-le-Château.

• 4. The Coup at the Château

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  By the morning of the 29th of January, Blücher knew Napoleon was coming. Russian Cossacks had captured all three couriers Napoleon sent to coordinate his generals, and the dispatches revealed his approach from the northeast with 30,000-40,000 soldiers. Blücher recalled Fabian Gottlieb von Osten-Sacken's corps from Lesmont to reinforce the town.

  The fighting opened with cavalry. The 9th Light Cavalry Division under Hippolyte Piré collided with three Cossack regiments at Maizières-lès-Brienne. The French horsemen eventually pressed back Nikolay Grigoryevich Scherbatov and Peter Petrovich Pahlen, though Lefebvre-Desnouettes was wounded in the action. By 3:00 pm Pahlen had retreated through Brienne and reformed on the Russian right flank. A French pursuit halted when it met three battalions of Jägers deployed in square formation.

  Napoleon ordered a general assault at 3:30 pm once Guillaume Philibert Duhesme's infantry reached the field. For an hour, Duhesme's soldiers and Olsufiev's corps fought to a standstill. Then Blücher spotted an opening: Duhesme's division was operating without cavalry support. The field marshal sent 40 cavalry squadrons under Pahlen and Vasilshikov crashing into the French left flank. The Russian horsemen routed Duhesme and captured eight artillery pieces. A group of Cossacks came close to seizing Napoleon himself. The emperor, described as unruffled, rallied his shaken men and led them back into action.

  Then came the audacious move that nearly changed everything. Victor's infantry, led by Louis Huguet-Chateau, slipped up to the château by an unguarded road and seized it. This coup was carried out by 400 soldiers of the 37th and 56th Line Infantry Regiments. Blücher and his chief of staff August Neidhardt von Gneisenau were inside, thinking the day's fighting was over, and nearly became prisoners. Huguet-Chateau's men also took four guns before a Russian counterattack drove them back out.

• 5. Night Battle and Withdrawal

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  Napoleon ordered Decouz's and Meunier's divisions, supported by cavalry under Lefebvre-Desnouettes, to storm Brienne proper. The assault failed completely. Pierre Decouz was mortally wounded; Rear Admiral Pierre Baste was killed outright. Jean-Jacques Germain Pelet-Clozeau took temporary command of Decouz's division in the middle of the fight.

  Blücher responded by ordering Sacken to clear the French from the town and Olsufiev to retake the château. After bitter fighting in the dark, Sacken drove the French out of most of Brienne. Olsufiev could not recover the château. Emmanuel de Grouchy sent Samuel-François Lhéritier's cavalry into the town, but the effort accomplished nothing.

  At midnight Blücher ordered Olsufiev's troops to begin retreating. Two hours later he gave Sacken the same order. The Russian cavalry held their positions until morning to screen the withdrawal. The French did not notice the retreat and did not occupy Brienne until 4:00 am. By then, the Prussian field marshal and his army had quietly slipped south, conceding the physical ground but preserving his force entirely intact.

  Francois Louis Forestier, commanding Victor's 2nd Division, was mortally wounded in the fighting. He died on the 5th of February. Decouz succumbed to his wounds on the 18th of February.

• 6. A Victory That Was Not

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  The historians who examined Brienne reached starkly different conclusions. Gaston Bodart counted 36,000 French engaged against 30,000 Allies and declared it a French victory with roughly 3,000 casualties on each side. Digby Smith agreed on the French numbers, placed Allied strength at 28,000, and also counted it a French win, though he calculated French losses at 3,500 and 11 guns.

  David G. Chandler reported French losses of 3,000 and Allied losses of 4,000 but called the battle inconclusive. George Nafziger counted only eight guns lost by the French, found the Russian claim to three additional captured guns doubtful, and gave combined casualties as 6,000 without assigning them to either side. Nikolay Orlov similarly called the result indecisive.

  Francis Loraine Petre offered the sharpest verdict. He put total casualties on both sides at around 3,000 each and called Brienne "scarcely a tactical victory for Napoleon; strategically it was little short of a defeat." The French held the field and the château, but Blücher had escaped, and he was already moving to join Schwarzenberg.

  Three days after Brienne, the two Allied armies combined their 120,000 men. On the 1st of February 1814, they brought 85,000 soldiers and 200 guns to bear against Napoleon at the Battle of La Rothière. Napoleon could oppose them with only 45,100 soldiers and 128 guns. The gamble at Brienne had not crippled Blücher, and the price of that failure arrived almost immediately.