Michel Ney

Michel Ney (born January 10, 1769, Sarrelouis, France—died December 7, 1815, Paris) was one of the best known of Napoleon’s marshals (from 1804). He pledged his allegiance to the restored Bourbon monarchy when Napoleon abdicated in 1814. Upon Napoleon’s return in 1815, Ney rejoined him and commanded the Old Guard at the Battle of Waterloo. Under the monarchy, again restored, he was charged with treason, for which he was condemned and shot by a firing squad.

Military service

Ney was the son of a barrel cooper and blacksmith. Apprenticed to a local lawyer, he ran away in 1788 to join a hussar regiment. His opportunity came with the revolutionary wars, in which he fought from the early engagements at Valmy and Jemappes in 1792 to the final battle of the First Republic at Hohenlinden in 1800.

The early campaigns revealed two contrasting features of Ney’s character: his great courage under fire and his strong aversion to promotion. Willing to hurl himself into battle at critical moments to inspire his troops by his personal example, he was unwilling to accept higher rank, and when his name was put forward he protested to his military and political superiors. In every instance he was overruled: it was as general of a division that he fought in Victor Moreau’s Army of the Rhine at Hohenlinden.

A year before that battle, Napoleon, under whom Ney had never served, had emerged as master of France. In May 1801 Ney was summoned to be presented to the First Consul at the Tuileries, where Napoleon and Joséphine had surrounded themselves with the ceremony and splendour of a court. The Army of the Rhine had been disbanded, and Ney had bought a modest farm in Lorraine. His first encounter with Bonaparte was formal and unremarkable, for the First Consul, regarding Moreau as a military rival and political opponent, viewed the close associates of that general with suspicion. Joséphine, however, took him up and found him a wife, Aglaé Auguié, one of her maids of honour and daughter of a high civil servant. They were married in the chapel of the Auguié château near Versailles. Ney, with his influential new connections, became, at 33, part of the social and military world of the Consulate.

When peace with England broke down and Bonaparte was assembling armies along the Channel coast, Ney asked for employment and was given command of the VI Army Corps. Early in 1804, when police uncovered a plot by émigré Royalists to kidnap or murder Napoleon and restore the Bourbons to the throne, Ney’s republican friend, General Moreau, was said to be involved, and with other alleged conspirators was put on public trial. Napoleon commuted Moreau’s two-year sentence for banishment. On May 19, 1804, the day after Napoleon had had himself proclaimed hereditary emperor of the French, he revived the ancient military rank of marshal, and 14 generals, including Ney, were gazetted marshals of the empire.

When Napoleon led his armies in swift marches into the heart of the Continent, after a new European coalition of Russia, Austria, and England had been formed against France, the first victory was won by Ney at Elchingen in October 1805—for which he was created duke of Elchingen in 1808—and less than two months later Napoleon defeated the Russo-Austrian armies at Austerlitz. Ney was active in the defeat of Prussia at Jena in 1806 and of the Russians at Eylau and Friedland in 1807. When he was sent to Spain in 1808, his fame for personal bravery remained undimmed, but at the same time he was also known as a touchy and temperamental commander whom the general staff found difficult to fit into a tactical pattern. His impulsiveness sometimes verged on insubordination when his orders did not come from the Emperor himself. Since Napoleon directed the Spanish operations by remote control, Ney quarrelled with all those set above him, and, early in 1811, he was sent home in near disgrace.

The Russian campaign of 1812 reestablished his position. On the morning after the somewhat inconclusive battle at Borodino, Napoleon made him prince de la Moskowa. On the retreat from Moscow, Ney was in command of the rear guard, a position in which he was exposed to Russian artillery fire and to numerous Cossack attacks. He rose to heights of courage, resourcefulness, and inspired improvisation that seemed miraculous to the men he led. “He is the bravest of the brave,” said Napoleon when Ney, for weeks given up as lost, joined the main body of the frozen and shrunken Grand Army.

In the European campaigns of 1813, Ney had to fight against former friends. Moreau had returned from exile in the U.S. to serve as Tsar Alexander I’s military adviser and was killed by a French cannonball outside Dresden. Ney had the mortification of being defeated at Dennewitz by the crown prince of Sweden, Charles XIV John, who as Jean Bernadotte had served as a sergeant in the revolutionary armies, as had Ney. At Leipzig, Ney was wounded and had to be sent home. The defeated army fought its way back across Germany into France, where, deaf to all appeals for peace, Napoleon launched a new campaign. Ney, commanding in eastern France, organized the kind of partisan warfare he had learned in the revolutionary wars.

Ney’s political shift

Napoleon concentrated his remaining forces at Fontainebleau to fight the allies in Paris, but Ney, speaking for himself and other marshals, told him that the army would not march. “The army will obey me,” said Napoleon. “Sire,” replied the Bravest of the Brave, “the army will obey its generals.” Napoleon was forced to abdicate. Ney retained his rank and titles and took an oath of fidelity to the Bourbon dynasty.

On March 1, 1815, Napoleon reappeared in France. Ney, ordered to take command in the district of Besançon, told the King “that man deserves to be brought back to Paris in an iron cage.” Ney, however, found that the population in his military district was intensely hostile to the Bourbons. Therefore, after receiving messages from Napoleon, he announced his decision to join the Emperor and was deliriously cheered by his soldiers and the populace. The King fled from Paris, and Napoleon reentered the Tuileries. Ney spent the period mostly in disgruntled retirement at his country estate. He saw little of Napoleon until three days before Waterloo, when he was summoned and asked to serve. He was put in charge of the left wing against the English, Napoleon taking the right wing against the Prussians, whom he defeated at Ligny. Ney fought the English in the drawn battle of Quatre-Bras. His conduct at Waterloo has remained a matter of controversy. When at nightfall the French fled from the field, Ney, his face blackened by smoke and holding a broken sword in his hand, shouted to a colleague: “If they catch us now, they’ll hang us,” a remark of prophetic accuracy.

Trial and death

After the second return of the Bourbons, Ney made a halfhearted attempt to flee the country, but was recognized and arrested in a remote corner of southwestern France. First put before a court-martial, he refused to recognize its competence and insisted on his right as a peer to be tried by the upper chamber. As he had expected, he was sentenced to death in one of the most divisive trials in French history. In December 1815, a firing squad in the Luxembourg Gardens ended what his soldiers had always regarded as a charmed life.

Ney was a soldier’s soldier, wholly without political ambition or judgment. He was at his greatest in the campaigns for France’s natural frontiers at the beginning and end of his career, but out of his depth in Napoleon’s intricate strategy for the domination of Europe. He showed little interest in external distinctions or social success. The dignity with which he met his death effaced the memory of his political vagaries and made him, in an epic age, the most heroic figure of his time.