Michel Ney

• 1. Introduction

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  Michel Ney stood before a firing squad in Paris on the 7th of December 1815 and refused to wear a blindfold. His reason was simple and devastating: he had spent twenty-five years staring down cannonballs and bullets. He then exercised one final privilege, giving the order to fire himself. Born a cooper's son in the French province of Lorraine, Ney rose from a clerk in a notary's office to become one of Napoleon's eighteen original Marshals of the Empire, earning the title "the bravest of the brave" from the emperor himself. The story of how a commoner from a German-French border town reached the heights of military glory, and why that same career ended with him giving the command for his own execution, is a window into an era when France remade its world from the ground up. How did a man who pressured Napoleon to abdicate end up dying for him? How did he survive the ice of the Dnieper River when thousands around him drowned, only to be condemned by 137 of his peers a few years later? And what did he mean when he interrupted his own lawyer to cry out in court: "I am French and I will remain French"?

• 2. A Commoner Who Rose

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  Sarrelouis sat on the French-German border in the province of Lorraine, and Ney grew up speaking both French and German in a town that was a French enclave inside a predominantly German region. His father, Pierre Ney, was a master cooper and a veteran of the Seven Years' War, and Ney was his second son. The family background gave Michel Ney no particular advantage in the old French military order, where entry to the officer corps required two generations of aristocratic birth. He studied at the College des Augustins until 1782, then spent his adolescence working first in a notary's office and later in mines and forges. By 1787, civilian life had failed to hold him, and he enlisted in the Colonel-General Hussar Regiment. What follows is a study in how the French Revolution opened a door that the Bourbon monarchy had kept firmly shut. Because Ney could not enter the officer corps under the old system, he climbed the non-commissioned ranks instead. When the Revolution swept away the aristocratic qualification, Ney was already positioned to move quickly. By September 1792, he was fighting at the Battle of Valmy. By October of that same year he had been commissioned as an officer under the Republic. From there his rise was rapid: a brigadier general by August 1796, a general of division by the 28th of March 1799, and briefly commanding the entire Army of the Rhine for less than a month in the autumn of that year. Along the way he was wounded at the Siege of Mainz, thrown from his horse and captured near the municipality of Dierdorf during the Battle of Neuwied on the 17th of April 1797, and then exchanged for an Austrian general on the 8th of May.

• 3. Napoleon's Hammer

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  On the 19th of May 1804, Ney received his marshal's baton, which made him one of the original eighteen Marshals of the Empire Napoleon had named. The baton was the Napoleonic era's equivalent of a Marshal of France, the highest military honour the state could give. Over the years that followed, Ney functioned as one of Napoleon's most reliable instruments of force. At Elchingen in 1805 he commanded the VI Corps of the Grande Armee and performed well enough that the name of the engagement was later attached to his ducal title. Later that year he invaded Tyrol and captured Innsbruck from Archduke John. In 1806 he fought at Jena and captured Erfurt; later in the same campaign he successfully besieged Magdeburg. At Eylau in 1807 he arrived with reinforcements at the critical moment and saved Napoleon from defeat. He was made Duke of Elchingen on the 6th of June 1808. His service in the Iberian Peninsula was a harder test. He joined Marshal Massena in Portugal in 1810, took Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, and fought on the River Coa. Then came the Lines of Torres Vedras, Wellington's scorched-earth trap, built in absolute secrecy. The French army that entered that trap lost 21,000 of its 61,000 men to hunger and attrition over several months without a decisive engagement. Ney managed the rearguard through a series of actions at Pombal, Redinha, Casal Novo, and Foz de Arouce, buying time for the main French force to retreat in 1811. He was eventually removed from command for insubordination.

• 4. The Dnieper Crossing

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  At Smolensk during the Russian campaign of 1812, Ney was wounded in the neck but recovered in time to fight at Borodino. The retreat from Moscow placed him in command of the rearguard, and what happened at the Battle of Krasnoi tested every quality that had carried him to the top. Cut off from the main army, Ney was offered an honorable surrender by the Russian commander Miloradovich; he refused. He led roughly 3,000 men on a night march through heavy fog, moving around the Russian position at Mankovo and following the brook Losvinka northward for about 13 kilometers. At midnight word came that the enemy was approaching. In the middle of the night Ney decided to cross the Dnieper. The crossing point, reportedly near the remote hamlet of Alekseyevka, was a summer ford with an almost vertical bank on the far side. The river was 110 meters wide and could reach up to 2 meters deep. The ice had only frozen for a couple of days and was already fragile; it broke in several places during the crossing. When the soldiers hesitated, Ney declared that if no one supported him, he would go alone. Those who heard him understood that this was not posturing. Of the 3,000 who started the crossing, 2,200 drowned. Ney and his remaining men climbed a 12-foot, steep icy slope on the far bank before they could consider themselves out of danger. By the time he rejoined the main army at Orsha, his contingent had been reduced to somewhere between 800 and 900 survivors from the 7,000 or so who had been with him in the previous 24 hours. Napoleon was delighted. It was for this action that the emperor gave Ney the title "the bravest of the brave." On the 25th of March 1813, Ney received the further title of Prince de la Moskowa.

• 5. The Marshals' Revolt

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  At Fontainebleau on the 4th of April 1814, after the Sixth Coalition had broken Napoleon's power in Europe, Ney became the spokesperson for the group of marshals who demanded the emperor step down. The exchange that followed was precise and brief. Napoleon told the assembled marshals that the army would obey him. Ney replied: "the army will obey its chiefs." Napoleon abdicated. Ney then pledged his loyalty to King Louis XVIII and was promoted and made a Peer of France in recognition. The Bourbon court did not entirely welcome him, however; he was a commoner by birth, and that fact remained an obstacle at Versailles regardless of his titles. When Napoleon escaped from Elba and began marching back toward Paris, Ney organized a force to intercept him and reportedly pledged to bring Napoleon back in an iron cage. Napoleon sent Ney a personal letter, writing in part that he would receive Ney as he had after the Battle of the Moskowa. On the 14th of March, on the main square in Lons-le-Saulnier in the Jura, Ney joined Napoleon with a force of 6,000 men. News of the defection reached Paris just two days before the King abandoned the capital. The effect of Ney's switch was decisive: it demonstrated that the restored monarchy could not hold the army. At Quatre Bras on the 16th of June 1815, Ney attacked Wellington while Napoleon attacked Blücher at Ligny nearby. A disputed order that same day led Ney to redirect d'Erlon's corps away from Ligny at a critical moment, leaving the Prussian army an open line of retreat and allowing Blücher to regroup in time for Waterloo.

• 6. Cannon Fire and Recklessness

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  At Waterloo on the 18th of June 1815, at around 3:30 in the afternoon, Ney ordered a mass cavalry charge against the Anglo-Allied infantry lines. His cavalry overran the enemy's cannons, but the infantry had formed into cavalry-proof square formations, and without the support of French infantry or artillery, the squares held. Debate about who ordered the charge and why it was unsupported has continued ever since. One specific failure is not in dispute: Ney's cavalry carried the equipment needed to spike the captured enemy cannons, which would have made them useless for the rest of the battle, and they failed to do it. The crews of those cannons had retreated into the squares for protection; when the cavalry withdrew, the crews returned to their pieces and resumed fire. Ney had five horses shot out from under him during the battle. Witnesses described him beating his sword against the side of a British cannon in furious frustration. At the end of the day, leading one of the last infantry charges, he shouted to his men: "Come and see how a marshal of France meets his death!" Multiple observers reported afterward that it seemed as though Ney was seeking death, and that death simply did not want him. He survived Waterloo. Napoleon did not survive its political consequences.

• 7. Trial and Final Words

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  Ney was arrested on the 3rd of August 1815. Marshal Moncey was ordered to preside over his court-martial and refused; Moncey was imprisoned for the refusal. Marshal Jourdan took the presidency, and when the court-martial convened on the 9th of November 1815 it included Massena, Augereau, and Mortier among the judges. The body voted 5-2 to declare itself "non-competent," effectively refusing to render a verdict. The trial then moved to the Chamber of Peers on the 16th of November. The prosecution's key witness was General Bourmont, an arch royalist and one of Ney's subordinate commanders. Bourmont testified that Ney had been a keen supporter of Napoleon and claimed that Ney had been wearing an Imperial Eagle decoration within minutes of switching sides, implying premeditation. Ney's response to this was delivered in court and on the record: "Monsieur de Bourmont accuses me to clear his own conduct... I appeal to a higher tribunal, to God who hears us all, to God who will judge us." No other witness corroborated the eagle decoration claim. Testimony from General Lecourbe, who had died before the trial, was read into the record; it showed Lecourbe believed Napoleon's 14,000 men could not practically be resisted by the 5,000 men of dubious loyalty under Ney's command. His lawyer Andre Dupin attempted a last legal maneuver: because Ney's hometown of Sarrelouis had been annexed by Prussia under the Treaty of Paris of 1815, Dupin argued that Ney was now Prussian and beyond the reach of a French treason charge. Ney interrupted his own lawyer and declared: "Je suis Francais et je resterai Francais!" On the 4th of December, 137 peers voted for the death penalty, 17 for deportation, and one single vote, cast by the Duc de Broglie, was for acquittal. He was condemned on the 6th of December and shot on the 7th. Ney is buried in Paris at the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, and his son Michel Louis Felix later died at Gallipoli during the Crimean War in 1854.