On 25 March 1814, on the open chalk plain of Champagne around Fère-Champenoise, some 26,000 Coalition horsemen caught two French corps under Marshals Auguste de Marmont and Édouard Mortier and drove them back in disorder. A few miles to the north, the same cavalry surrounded two divisions of raw National Guards escorting a convoy and destroyed them after a day of resistance in square. The double defeat removed the last French force standing between the Allied armies and Paris, which fell six days later.
Napoleon's gamble
By March 1814 the Campaign of France was going against Napoleon. After his setback at Arcis-sur-Aube on 20 and 21 March he decided to march east toward Saint-Dizier, hoping that a threat to their lines of supply would pull the Allied armies away from Paris. The plan failed. Instead of following him, the Allies under Field Marshal Karl Philipp zu Schwarzenberg turned west toward the capital.1
Marmont and Mortier, who had been facing Field Marshal Blücher's army in the north, were still marching east to join the emperor. They did not grasp how close the enemy was. Early on 25 March they ran straight into the advancing Allied main army near Soudé and Vatry, east of Fère-Champenoise.2
A retreat in the hail
The Allies sent their cavalry first. The Napoleon and Empire site gives them 26,400 Austrian, Russian and Prussian horsemen, against about 22,450 French, including 4,350 cavalry. The marshals began a fighting withdrawal west along the main road, through Sommesous toward Fère-Champenoise.3
For hours the retreat held together. Then, near Connantray, the French were caught by a sudden hailstorm and then by an awkward ravine that threw their line into disorder. The historian John Rickard describes how the Allied cavalry took the chance to charge, briefly sweeping up both marshals in the chaos. The French line rallied, broke, re-formed on the heights west of Fère-Champenoise and broke again. By nightfall the survivors were at Allemant, to the northwest.4
The last squares of the National Guard
North of the main fight, General Michel-Marie Pacthod was escorting a food convoy west from Vatry with two divisions made up mostly of National Guards. These were townsmen and villagers called up with little training; the Fondation Napoléon, reviewing Jean-Pierre Mir's history of the Guards of 1813 and 1814, describes them as the last to arrive and the first to die. Around 10 in the morning Russian cavalry attacked them near Villeseneux.5
Pacthod's men formed squares and tried to fight their way southwest toward Fère-Champenoise, but by the time they neared the town it was already in Allied hands. According to FrenchEmpire.net, which follows the historian Andrew Uffindell, the fighting withdrawal lasted some six hours, until ammunition ran out. Pacthod refused to discuss surrender while the enemy guns were still firing. In the end the squares were overrun, and Pacthod and General Amey were among the prisoners. The Fondation Napoléon calls the Pacthod column decimated after resisting to the last square.6
The road to Paris
Losses are hard to establish, and figures vary between historians. Rickard puts the losses of Marmont and Mortier at about 10,000 men and at least 60 guns, just over half of their army, and Allied losses at 4,000.7
The defeat removed any chance of slowing the Allies. Napoleon heard of it only on 27 March, far to the east. Marmont and Mortier fell back to Paris with what remained of their corps and fought the Allies outside the city on 30 March. Paris capitulated that night, and Allied troops entered it on 31 March. Soon afterwards Napoleon abdicated. The wider story of his wars is told in our guide to the greatest Napoleonic battles.8
