Battle of Sedan 1870: How an Emperor Was Captured

Sedan is a small fortress town on the Meuse in the French Ardennes. On 1 September 1870 more than 200,000 German soldiers closed a ring around a French army there, and by the next morning an emperor and his whole army were prisoners. It was the decisive battle of the Franco-Prussian War, and within two days it brought down the Second Empire.²

Who won the Battle of Sedan?

Prussia and its German allies won. Two German armies fought the battle: the III Army of Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia and the Army of the Meuse of Crown Prince Albert of Saxony. Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the Prussian General Staff, directed them, and King Wilhelm I followed the battle with Moltke, Bismarck and the Crown Prince from a hilltop south of the town. On the other side stood the Army of Châlons under Marshal Patrice de MacMahon, with Emperor Napoleon III himself present.³

How did the French army end up trapped at Sedan?

After the defeats of August, Marshal Bazaine's army was shut up in Metz, and MacMahon formed a new army at the camp of Châlons. He was inclined to fall back on Paris, but the Count of Palikao, head of the government, and the Empress pressed him to march to Bazaine's relief, and on 23 August he set out to the northeast, toward Montmédy and Stenay. Moltke turned his armies north to catch him. The French V Corps was beaten at Beaumont on 30 August, and the whole army fell back on Sedan, worn out by marches, short of food and in need of rest.⁴

The position had real strengths. The fortress covered the rear, and the Meuse and the valleys of the Givonne and the Floing brooks lay in front of the French lines. The Calvary of Illy, a height backed by the Bois de Garenne, was the key to the north, and Bazeilles was a strong salient to the southeast. But the army was squeezed into a narrow strip between the Meuse and the Belgian frontier, and the Meuse bridges at Bazeilles and Donchery were not destroyed. Moltke says the order was given but never carried out by the exhausted men, and Ducrot calls it a negligence that was cruelly paid for.⁵

How many soldiers fought at Sedan?

Estimates vary. The Fondation Napoléon counts about 120,000 French with nearly 600 guns against 200,000 Germans with 800 guns, and the French Ministry of the Armed Forces also gives about 120,000 against 200,000. Larousse gives 120,000 French and 400 guns, with 240,000 Germans and 800 guns massed on the heights. The Deutsches Historisches Museum speaks of more than 200,000 Germans encircling about 130,000 French.⁶

What happened at Bazeilles?

The battle began at dawn at Bazeilles, where the Bavarians of General Ludwig von der Tann attacked the XII Corps of General Barthélemy Lebrun. The village was held by General de Vassoigne's division, formed from twelve battalions of the four regiments of marine infantry: the "Blue Division" of French memory. They fought the Bavarians house by house for hours.⁷

The village burned, and the two sides told its story differently. The Fondation Napoléon notes that armed civilians helped the marines. Lebrun, writing in 1884, accuses the Bavarians of setting the houses on fire by hand in reprisal for their heavy losses, and rejects the German claim that French shells had started the blaze.⁸

The most famous episode was the last stand in an inn at the edge of the village, the house of the Bourgerie family. A group of marine infantrymen barricaded the doors and windows and fired on the Bavarians for more than two and a half hours, until their cartridges ran out. Their senior officer, Commandant Arsène Lambert, who had come in wounded, negotiated their surrender, and a Bavarian captain spared the survivors. The house is now the Maison de la Dernière Cartouche museum.⁹

Why did the French lose at Sedan?

The French army was beaten by encirclement and artillery, but it also lost its commander in the first hours. Between six and seven in the morning MacMahon was badly wounded by a shell splinter in the thigh. He handed command to General Auguste Ducrot, who ordered the army to gather at Illy and retreat west toward Mézières while there was still time.¹⁰

General Emmanuel Félix de Wimpffen had arrived from Algeria only days before to take over the V Corps, and he carried a letter from the war minister naming him commander if MacMahon were disabled. He thought the road to Mézières was already lost and wanted instead to break out east toward Carignan and Bazaine. At half past eight he wrote to Ducrot that he had a letter appointing him commander of the army, "we will talk about it after the battle" ("nous en parlerons après la bataille"), and he cancelled the retreat. Ducrot gave way, and the divisions already moving off were called back.¹¹

Both French generals defended themselves in print after the war. Ducrot accused Wimpffen of ambition, of wanting the day to be his own. Wimpffen answered that he had acted out of duty, that Ducrot's retreat would have led straight to defeat, and that it had already cost the XII Corps its positions above Bazeilles. Larousse adds that the emperor, who was ill, did not intervene.¹²

How the ring closed

Meanwhile the German III Army had crossed the Meuse west of the town and marched around the French northern flank, and by noon it had linked up with the Army of the Meuse north of Sedan. The German guns then did most of the work. Moltke describes the batteries of the III Army and of the Guard crossing their fire from two sides, and Hooper counts 426 German guns in action soon after one o'clock against French troops packed into an area less than two miles across. General Félix Douay's VII Corps retook the Calvary of Illy but had to give it up again by two o'clock, and the Bois de Garenne behind it, full of broken units, was shelled by sixty guns of the Guard.¹³

What was the cavalry charge at Floing?

Between two and three in the afternoon, with German infantry advancing on the plain of Floing and the French line giving way, Ducrot ordered the cavalry division of General Jean-Auguste Margueritte, chiefly Chasseurs d'Afrique with hussars and chasseurs, to charge the Prussian battalions. Margueritte rode forward to look at the ground and was mortally wounded, shot in the head.¹⁴

Who led the charge after him is still argued over. Gaston de Galliffet wrote in his report that Margueritte sent him the order to take command of the division and that Ducrot then ordered the charge. Lebrun, writing in 1884, calls Galliffet's command a legend: with General Tilliard and the senior colonel already killed, he says, the order went to the next colonel in line, Colonel de Bauffremont.¹⁵

The squadrons charged again and again for about half an hour. They broke through lines of skirmishers but were cut down by the steady volleys of the formed German companies behind them and by guns firing case shot. A few riders got as far as Floing or down to the Meuse. Moltke and Hooper agree that only about half of the horsemen came back.¹⁶

Watching from the heights of Frénois, King Wilhelm is said to have exclaimed, "Ah, the brave men!" The words are quoted in German by the Fondation Napoléon and in French by Larousse, and they became part of the legend of the charge.¹⁷

Why did Napoleon III surrender?

By the late afternoon there was nowhere left to go. Columns of beaten troops poured down into Sedan from the heights, and German shells burst among them in the crowded streets. Napoleon III, who had declined to follow Wimpffen's attempts to break out, had the white flag raised to stop what he saw as a useless slaughter. Moltke saw the white flags on the towers at about half past four.¹⁸

At about half past six General Reille rode up the hill and handed the King a letter. It began: "N'ayant pu mourir au milieu de mes troupes, il ne me reste qu'à remettre mon épée" ("Not having been able to die in the midst of my troops, nothing remains for me but to place my sword", in Your Majesty's hands). It was a personal surrender, not the army's: the fate of the army still had to be negotiated, and on the German side that task fell to Moltke.¹⁹

How was the capitulation of Sedan signed?

The talks took place that night in a house at Donchery. Moltke, with Bismarck beside him, demanded the surrender of the whole army as prisoners of war. Wimpffen asked that the army be allowed to leave on condition that it did not fight again in this war, and argued that generosity would buy a lasting peace. Bismarck, as he later told Moritz Busch, answered that one might count on the gratitude of a prince but not of a people. When General Castelnau, speaking for the emperor, said that the sword handed over had been the emperor's alone, Moltke held coldly to his terms. The French went back to Sedan to consult, under the threat that the guns would open fire again in the morning.²⁰

Early on 2 September Napoleon III left Sedan hoping to speak to the King. Bismarck met him on the road near Frénois and took him to a small house nearby, where they talked for about three quarters of an hour, but the King would not see him until the surrender was signed. Late that morning Wimpffen put his name to the capitulation at the Château de Bellevue, near Frénois, where the King met the captive emperor afterward.²¹

How many died and were captured at Sedan?

Moltke put the German loss at 460 officers and 8,500 men killed and wounded, and the French loss at about 17,000, caused above all by the German artillery. Hooper gives 8,924 Germans and, for the French, 3,000 killed and 14,000 wounded. The German Historical Institute's documentation gives about 2,300 German dead, 6,000 wounded and 700 captured or missing. The Deutsches Historisches Museum puts the dead and wounded of both sides together at about 26,000. Moltke and Hooper both count some 3,000 French soldiers who escaped into Belgium and were disarmed there.²²

The prisoners were far more numerous. The German official history counts about 21,000 French soldiers taken during the battle and 83,000 more by the capitulation, a total of about 104,000. The Fondation Napoléon rounds the second figure to 80,000. The captives were held on the peninsula of Iges in a loop of the Meuse, the "camp of misery", before being marched off to Germany from 5 September, and nearly 550 French officers were released on parole not to serve again in the war.²³

What were the consequences of the Battle of Sedan?

Napoleon III left on 3 September for the castle of Wilhelmshöhe near Kassel, where he was held as a prisoner. News of the disaster reached Paris the same day. On 4 September a crowd invaded the Legislative Body, the Republic was proclaimed at the Hôtel de Ville, and the Empire collapsed almost without a defense.²⁴

The war went on. Bazaine's army was still shut in Metz, and the Germans marched on Paris, which was besieged from September 1870 until the armistice of 28 January 1871. The story is told in our article on the siege of Paris. The armies the new republic raised in the provinces won only rare successes, such as Coulmiers in November. By the Treaty of Frankfurt France paid a heavy indemnity and gave up Alsace and the Moselle, while the victory sealed the founding of a German Empire under Prussia.²⁵

How was Sedan remembered?

In Germany, 2 September became Sedan Day, the Sedantag, first celebrated in 1873 with church services, parades and speeches. In Berlin the Victory Column was inaugurated that year on the third anniversary of the battle. It was the nearest thing the empire had to a national holiday, though many Catholic areas, the Social Democrats and parts of southern Germany kept away. Interest faded after 1900, and the Weimar government ended the official celebrations in 1919.²⁶

In France Sedan stood for national humiliation, but the defense of Bazeilles became a patriotic myth. De Neuville's painting drew crowds at the Salon of 1873, and the house of the last cartridges became a museum, saved by a national subscription in 1899. Sedan also has a place in our ranking of the greatest battles of France. For the longer story of both armies see the military history of France and the military history of Germany.²⁷