Battle of Paris (1814)

• 1. Introduction

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  On the morning of the 30th of March 1814, the city of Paris woke to the sound of artillery. For two decades, Napoleon had carried war to every corner of Europe. Now, for the first time in living memory, the armies of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Württemberg stood at the gates of the French capital itself. The question that day was not whether Paris would fight, but whether it could hold long enough to matter. Marshal Auguste de Marmont commanded the right wing of the defense. Marshal Edouard Mortier held the left. Together they had roughly 25,000 line troops and a further 12,000 National Guardsmen, many of whom had only just received their weapons in the days before the assault. Against them, the Coalition had massed somewhere between 100,000 and 145,000 soldiers, depending on whose count you trust. The emperor himself was not in the city. He was racing across the countryside, three days behind, having only realized the day before that his enemies had beaten him in the sprint to Paris. His wife, Empress Marie Louise, and his young son Napoleon II had already fled south on the 29th of March. What unfolded over the next thirty-six hours would end a coalition war, force an emperor off his throne, and set the crowd in the streets shouting for the Bourbons.

• 2. The Road to the Gates

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  At the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, fought over four days from the 16th to the 19th, Napoleon suffered a defeat that cracked the foundations of his empire. He retreated across the Rhine with somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 soldiers. Left behind in German fortresses were garrisons numbering 100,000 men he would never recover. Former allies such as the Kingdom of Bavaria switched to the Coalition side. By the 1st of December 1813, Napoleon could deploy only 129,106 men against a combined Allied force that dwarfed him on every front: 156,868 in the Army of Bohemia under Schwarzenberg, 77,100 in the Army of Silesia under Blücher, 30,000 Prussians under Bülow, and 36,000 Russians under Wintzingerode. Three Coalition armies crossed into France in late December and early January. The Army of Bohemia crossed the upper Rhine near Basel on the 20th of December 1813. Blücher's Army of Silesia passed the middle Rhine on the 1st of January 1814. Wintzingerode followed on the 6th of January. Napoleon was not passive. In his famous Six Days' Campaign between the 10th and the 14th of February, he repeatedly struck Blücher's overextended army, inflicting some 16,000 casualties and capturing 47 guns while losing only around 4,000 men himself. He then turned south and crushed Schwarzenberg's advance guard at Mormant on the 17th of February and routed Crown Prince William of Württemberg at Montereau the following day. But these tactical victories could not offset the strategic arithmetic. By mid-March, Napoleon was fighting on multiple fronts with a fraction of the forces arrayed against him. At Arcis-sur-Aube on the 20th-the 21st of March, the Allies enjoyed a numerical advantage of 80,000 to 28,000 French and defeated him again. Emperor Francis I of Austria, present at Bar-sur-Aube, came within a few hours of being captured by French cavalry as he fled to Dijon.

• 3. The Decision to March on Paris

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  The choice that sealed Paris's fate began with an intercepted letter. Allied forces captured an uncoded message from Napoleon to his empress in which he wrote that he had decided to move toward the Marne to push enemy armies away from Paris and draw himself nearer his own fortresses. A second intercepted dispatch, from Chief of Police Jean René Savary to Napoleon, reported that Paris's magazines were empty and its population was demanding peace. Tsar Alexander I of Russia read both dispatches and recognized the opening they presented. He consulted three generals: Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly, Hans Karl von Diebitsch, and Karl Wilhelm von Toll. Barclay de Tolly favored following Napoleon. Diebitsch proposed sending 40,000 or 50,000 men toward Paris while trailing Napoleon with the rest. Toll argued for advancing on Paris with most of the armies while dispatching 10,000 cavalry under Wintzingerode to shadow Napoleon as a distraction. Alexander sided with Toll's view, and the King of Prussia and Schwarzenberg were persuaded to adopt this strategy. Orders went to Blücher to cooperate in the march on Paris. The first consequence came swiftly. On the 25th of March 1814, Marmont and Mortier, with 19,000 soldiers, stumbled into the advancing Army of Bohemia at the Battle of Fère-Champenoise and were badly beaten, suffering 6,000 casualties and losing 45 guns. A nearby French force of 4,300 men and 16 guns under General Michel-Marie Pacthod was surrounded and destroyed entirely. Blocked from retreating toward Meaux, the survivors escaped to Paris via Provins. Napoleon, meanwhile, won a pointless engagement against Wintzingerode's 10,000 horsemen at Saint-Dizier on the 26th of March. The following day he grasped that his opponents had a three-day lead.

• 4. A City Unprepared

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  Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's elder brother, was nominally in charge of defending Paris. The source of the city's vulnerability, however, ran deeper than any one commander. Napoleon himself had rejected a plan to fortify Paris with earthworks back in January 1814, fearing that walling in his own capital would signal weakness to the French public. The plan was briefly revived, but Joseph insisted on delaying it for Napoleon's personal approval, and that approval never came. What the defenders had instead was modest: 56 wooden barricades to deter cavalry, armed with 40 four-pounder guns and 20 eight-pounder guns. Marshal Bon-Adrien Jeannot de Moncey commanded the National Guard. The regular army units and Imperial Guard reserves that made up the remainder of the defense were numerically small and spread thin. Half the National Guard was not even armed with muskets; most of the weapons were distributed only between the 27th and the 30th of March. Behind the French lines, the diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was already at Paris and working against Napoleon. Joseph's chief-of-staff was General Maurice Mathieu, but administrative disorganization hampered the effort throughout. When the battle finally came, two 12-gun batteries of 12-pounder guns sat at La Rouvrai near Pantin and at Le Pré-Saint-Gervais; smaller batteries of lighter caliber covered Montreuil, Charonne, and Montmartre. The force that would face over 100,000 battle-hardened troops had been assembled hastily, commanded haphazardly, and defended a city that its own emperor had refused to fortify.

• 5. Thirty Hours of Fighting

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  Duke Eugen of Württemberg received his orders from General Nikolay Raevsky to attack at 7:00 am on the 30th of March. The assault was backed by two cuirassier divisions from the Reserve. The initial Russian push drove through Pantin and the Romainville woods, but triggered a sharp French counterattack. By 9:00 am Raevsky was already feeding in General Charles de Lambert's 1st and 2nd Grenadier Divisions from the Reserve. The village of Pantin became the axis of the heaviest fighting, and the battle in the center settled into a stalemate. Marmont's positions were battered but not broken; by 11:00 am both marshals reported to Joseph that their defenses still held. Then a proclamation from Schwarzenberg arrived. When Joseph read it and realized he was fighting two full Coalition armies, he panicked. He authorized Marmont and Mortier to negotiate a capitulation, then fled south with a party of government officials. At noon, the Prussian Guard emerged from Pantin, was repulsed in its first attack, and then launched a second thrust that captured some French guns. At 1:00 pm, Blücher's army took Aubervilliers while sending troops to mask Saint-Denis. At 2:00 pm, Barclay de Tolly paused all attacks to reorganize; his only uncommitted infantry were two divisions of the Russian Imperial Guard. On the southern flank, the Crown Prince of Württemberg's wing seized the bridges at Saint-Maur and Charenton and surrounded the Chateau Vincennes. A French force of 28 guns tried to stop the advance and was overrun by Russian uhlans, though French dragoons recovered most of the guns. When Blücher's army appeared on the Russian right, Barclay de Tolly launched the final push. The Russian Guard infantry under General Aleksey Yermolov entered the fight. A French 12-pounder battery ran out of ammunition and was overrun by the Prussian Guard. At 5:00 pm the fighting stopped. The terms required the French to abandon Montmartre and withdraw inside the city. The following morning the Allies would enter at 7:00 am, with hostilities not resuming until 9:00 am.

• 6. Collapse and Abdication

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  When Coalition armies marched into Paris on the 31st of March, the crowds in the streets cried out "Vive les Bourbons! Vivent les souverains! Vivent nos libérateurs!" Napoleon raced ahead of his army with only five officers as an escort and reached Essonnes that same day. There, General Augustin Daniel Belliard, who had commanded the cavalry defending Paris, explained to him that the capital had fallen. By the 1st of April, Napoleon had massed 36,000 troops at Fontainebleau. He considered abdicating in favor of his son Napoleon II, but the Allied leaders ruled out that possibility. On the 2nd of April, pushed by Talleyrand, the French Senate voted to depose Napoleon and his entire family in the Acte de déchéance de l'Empereur, the "Emperor's Demise Act." Napoleon still controlled an army. At a meeting with his generals, he deployed his forces south of Paris with the right flank at Melun and the left at La Ferté-Alais on the 3rd of April. Marshal Michel Ney confronted him directly. Ney said, "The army will not march." Napoleon answered, "The army will obey me." Ney replied, "The army will obey its chiefs." Even as this confrontation unfolded, Marmont had signed a secret agreement with the new French government and Schwarzenberg. On the 4th of April, while Napoleon's marshals were negotiating with the Allies, Marmont's entire corps marched away to Versailles under General Joseph Souham's command; most of the soldiers did not realize what was happening until Coalition forces surrounded them. Eleven thousand men were thus removed from Napoleon's order of battle in a single stroke. Napoleon abdicated unconditionally in the Treaty of Fontainebleau on the 11th of April 1814, with the Senate having already proclaimed Louis XVIII king of France.