Marshal Bazaine

Biography

Achille François Bazaine was born on February 13, 1811, in Versailles, the son of a minor civil servant. He rose through the French army from private to Marshal of France over forty years — an exceptional trajectory for a man without wealth or connections, earned through demonstrated competence in Algeria, the Crimea, Italy, and Mexico. By 1870 he was the most experienced combat commander in France, the soldier who had built the best professional reputation in the army. He was also, when the moment of his greatest test arrived, either a traitor, a coward, a defeatist, or simply a man whose nerve broke under the weight of an impossible situation — and historians have never fully agreed which. Bazaine commanded the Army of the Rhine — 180,000 men, the largest and best-equipped French force — as the war opened. After the defeats of Worth and Spicheren, he was appointed overall commander and immediately faced the problem of extricating this massive force from the encirclement that Moltke was constructing. He fought a series of rearguard actions culminating in Gravelotte, where his army came close to breaking through but ultimately failed, and then retreated into Metz with his entire force. Inside Metz, Bazaine's behavior became increasingly incomprehensible. He launched sorties that achieved nothing and were quickly abandoned. He entered into negotiations with both the enemy and the deposed imperial government about political arrangements that might justify capitulation — apparently hoping for a settlement in which he surrendered to end the war while preserving the imperial regime. On October 27, 1870, he surrendered 173,000 men and 1,570 cannon — the largest capitulation in French history. The court-martial was inevitable. In 1873 Bazaine was convicted of capitulating without having exhausted all means of resistance and sentenced to death — later commuted to twenty years in a fortress. In 1874 he escaped from the Île Sainte-Marguerite, apparently with assistance from his young wife, and fled to Spain and then Mexico, where he died in poverty in 1888. Whether he was a traitor who deliberately prolonged Metz's hold to enable political negotiations, or simply a commander whose judgment failed under enormous pressure, has never been definitively resolved.

Key Battles