The Napoleonic Wars, Volume 4 by Gregory Fremont-Barnes

Author:Gregory Fremont-Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Napoleonic Wars (4): The fall of the French empire 1813–1815
ISBN: 9781472809872
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Having rejected a generous Allied peace offer, Napoleon opted to fight under increasingly dire circumstances. Heavily outnumbered and facing opponents on several fronts, he had no real chance of ejecting them from home soil. While he still retained a quarter of a million men under arms, many of these were poorly-trained and recently recruited, while the Allies could deploy more than double this number, including over 100,000 men in the south under Wellington. Bernadotte, approaching from Holland, Blücher, from Lorraine, and Schwarzenberg, from Switzerland, led another 300,000 between them. While the campaign of 1814 demonstrated that Napoleon had not lost his tactical genius, the sheer number of his opponents and the poor quality of his own forces would ultimately tell.

Encouraged by their success at La Rothière, Schwarzenberg and Blücher pushed on up the Seine and the Marne toward Paris, but suffered a succession of minor reverses in the process. Marmont succeeded in recapturing Arcis-sur- Aube on 3 February, cavalry under General Grouchy (1766–1847) blocked a Russian advance near Troyes, and, to the north, the French held Yorck’s advance in check at Vitry. Also, at Sens, on the Yonne, a body of Cossacks were driven off. These minor setbacks persuaded the already cautious Schwarzenberg to slow his advance, concerned as he was about intelligence of a new assembly of French troops at Lyon under Marshal Augereau (1757–1816). Blücher, on the other hand, made all speed up the Marne for Paris, brushing aside the weak contingents seeking to oppose his progress.

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