Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande, 1870: the Army of the Loire's road to Paris blocked

By late November 1870 Paris had been besieged for two months, and the new French armies raised in the provinces had one task: break through to the capital. At Beaune-la-Rolande, a small walled town in the Loiret, the Army of the Loire tried for the first time. Moltke's own history describes a single Prussian corps holding off a force several times its size until help came at dusk.²

After Coulmiers

On 9 November the Army of the Loire had won at Coulmiers and retaken Orléans, a victory that restored French confidence. But the surrender of Metz on 27 October freed Prince Frederick Charles's Second Army, which marched south toward the Loire. According to Moltke, the French dug in around Orléans and gathered some 200,000 men there, while the German infantry opposite them for the moment numbered no more than 45,000.³ › Battle of Coulmiers, 1870

Léon Gambetta, who directed the war from Tours, pressed for a new offensive. In Moltke's account, when General d'Aurelle de Paladines objected, Gambetta took the dispositions into his own hands and telegraphed orders: the XV Corps was to make for Pithiviers, the XX for Beaune-la-Rolande, and both were then to advance on Paris by way of Fontainebleau. D'Aurelle warned that they would meet some 80,000 Germans in open country and that it would be wiser to wait for them in entrenchments. Under fresh instructions from Tours, General Crouzat ordered his XVIII and XX Corps to make a converging attack on Beaune-la-Rolande on 28 November.⁴

The attack on 28 November

In Moltke's account, the Prussian X Corps of General von Voigts-Rhetz lay spread out around the town: the 38th Brigade at Beaune itself, the 39th at Les Côtelles and the 37th with the corps artillery at Marcilly between them. On the French right the XVIII Corps drove in the outposts of the 39th Brigade early in the morning, took Juranville and Corbeilles and held off a Prussian counterattack that briefly retook Juranville with 300 prisoners. An afternoon attack on the Prussian position at Long Cour, not prepared by artillery, broke down under the fire of five batteries; Les Côtelles fell at the second attempt, but the XVIII Corps advanced no further and settled for an ineffective cannonade as dusk fell.⁵

On the left, Moltke continues, the XX Corps came on against Beaune from the north and west. Around noon, with its reserve division up, it drove in the German outposts, captured a gun whose crew had nearly all been killed, and pushed onto the heights east of the town. The Prussian 16th Regiment was left isolated in Beaune, surrounded on three sides. It held the town, ringed by the remains of a high wall, and the churchyard. French shells broke through the churchyard walls and set buildings on fire, but every assault was beaten off.⁶

Help at dusk

According to Moltke, the rescue came from the III Corps of General von Alvensleben. The first reports from Beaune had sounded so mild that its corps artillery went back to quarters, but as the cannon fire grew louder Alvensleben ordered the corps forward; General von Stülpnagel had already set out with the 5th Division on his own initiative. From about 4:30 its leading regiment engaged the French at Arconville and Batilly, retook the lost gun, and with four batteries in support drove the French from the west side of Beaune. The 1st Cavalry Division, appearing on the French flank from Boynes, stopped the advance east of the town. By nightfall the XX Corps had fallen back to Bois Commun and Bellegarde.⁷

The cost and what followed

Moltke sums up the day: Voigts-Rhetz held his ground with 11,000 men against 60,000, three brigades against six divisions, until help reached him toward evening. He counts 900 German and 1,300 French killed and wounded, and 1,800 unwounded French prisoners.⁸

Writing in London four days later, Friedrich Engels counted Beaune-la-Rolande among a string of French defeats that week, from Amiens to the sorties from Paris. The attempt to relieve the capital from outside had failed, he concluded, because the attacks were made without the necessary energy and concentration of forces. A fortnight later he judged that d'Aurelle had handled his troops badly, with only a small part of them ready for his first attempt to break through. After further defeats at Loigny and Artenay in early December the French evacuated Orléans again on 5 December, and the government left Tours for Bordeaux.⁹