On 19 January 1871 the German First Army under General August Karl von Goeben defeated the French Army of the North under General Louis Faidherbe around the town of Saint-Quentin in Picardy. It was the last attempt by a French field army in the north to break the German grip on Paris. On the same day a sortie from besieged Paris was beaten back at Buzenval, and within days the French capital gave up the struggle.
An army of recruits
After the defeat of the imperial armies in the summer and autumn of 1870, the new Government of National Defense raised fresh armies in the provinces to break the siege of Paris. In December 1870 it gave command of the Army of the North to Faidherbe, an engineer officer who had made his name as governor of Senegal. His troops were mostly raw recruits, mobile guards and mobilized national guards, short of supplies and fighting through a hard winter.1
Even so, Faidherbe gave the Germans serious trouble. His army fought on the Hallue near Pont-Noyelles in late December (the French Ministry of the Armed Forces dates it to 22 December, the publisher Helion to 23 December) and at Bapaume at the start of January 1871. The Ministry counts both as Faidherbe's victories, while Helion notes that after Bapaume each side believed itself beaten. The French failed to save the fortress of Péronne, which fell on 9 January.2
The battle
To force the Germans to draw troops away from the siege of Paris, Faidherbe set out again in mid-January and moved toward Saint-Quentin. Goeben, who now commanded the German First Army, sent several divisions converging on the town. On 19 January the Germans attacked and defeated the French in fighting around the town. The publisher Helion's account of the campaign calls it a final and decisive German victory.3 › Siege of Paris, 1870-1871
The sizes of the armies and their losses are uncertain. The history of the battle published by the Aisne departmental council says that Faidherbe marched on Saint-Quentin with nearly 40,000 men, barely 600 of them cavalry. It counts nearly 3,500 French killed and wounded, with several thousand stragglers captured on the road to Cambrai, and puts German losses at between 4,000 and 5,000 killed or wounded. These figures should be read as estimates.4
Beaten but not destroyed
How badly the French were beaten is still argued. The Aisne departmental council's history says the Army of the North had spent the last of its strength and could no longer take the offensive. A report published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1871 paints a different picture: the Germans took guns and prisoners, and some French battalions broke, but the army withdrew along the roads to Cambrai and Le Cateau, Goeben did not press the pursuit hard, and by 10 February Faidherbe had brought it back almost to the strength it had at Saint-Quentin by absorbing new recruits.5
It no longer mattered. The sortie from Paris toward Buzenval on the same day ended in disaster. Paris surrendered at the end of January, and the French Ministry of the Armed Forces dates the armistice to 28 January 1871.6
How Faidherbe is remembered
Defeat at Saint-Quentin did not ruin Faidherbe's reputation. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica described his campaign as perhaps the most honorable to the French army in the whole of what it called the People's War, and statues of him were raised at Lille, Bapaume and Saint-Quentin itself. A painting by Émile Breton from 1871, shown above, captures the battlefield on the night after the fighting.7
