Commemorating Loigny: Catholic Memory in France, 1870-1914

UWE History, Neil Edmunds’ Fund, Occasional Papers No. 2, November 2013
Commemorating Loigny: Catholic Memory in France, 1870-1914

Martin Simpson^

The Franco-Prussian war was greeted with a surge of bellicose enthusiasm in France. In Émile Zola’s Nana as the eponymous courtesan dies in the Grand Hôtel, rotted by smallpox, crowds outside gather to shout ‘À Berlin! À Berlin! À Berlin!’ Six weeks later the Second Empire, rotted by moral corruption - in the perspective of many besides Zola - collapsed in ignominy in the wake of a string of defeats culminating in the disastrous battle of Sedan, where the Emperor Napoleon III himself and the entire 83,000 strong Army of Châlons passed into Prussian captivity. Adolphe Perraud, future bishop of Autun and chaplain in the Army of Châlons, described Sedan as ‘an unspeakable disaster, worse than Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt’.¹ It did not, however, mark the final defeat of France. The surrender of Napoleon III was not the surrender of the French nation. The republican Government of National Defence, proclaimed within twenty-four hours of news of Sedan reaching Paris, drawing on myths of l’an deux (1793-4) looked to a new levée en masse to raise a citizen army that would repulse the invader.²

Despite the resonance of this myth, the fresh armies were ultimately to prove no match for the German invaders. In 1872 Perraud was preaching to a defeated nation, contrasting the victories and glories of Joan of Arc with the disasters of l’année terrible 1870-71. Notwithstanding his unequivocal judgement that France’s embrace of scepticism, rationalism and materialism had cut her off from the divine assistance that underpinned the triumphs of Clovis, Charles Martel and Joan, Perraud identified some moments of glory. Speaking in Dieppe in August 1871 he drew attention to the heroic cavalry charges at Reichshoffen, while in 1872 he argued that the defence of Orléans on 11 October 1870 had ‘saved the honour of the French flag’.³ There was a sustained effort to construct compensating narratives of glorious resistance around the war, submerging the reality of defeat in a sense of moral victory. Focusing on resistance against German barbarism might go some way to healing injured national pride. Episodes such as the sacrificial cavalry charges led by general Alexandre Gallifet at Floïng had myths woven around them as a tonic to national spirits. Alphonse de Neuville’s 1873 painting that immortalised the maison de la dernière cartouche at Bazeilles, a desperate resistance by a handful of French marines, fighting literally to the last bullet, was hailed in this light.⁴ Patriotic myths that delivered lessons of French moral superiority offered a narrative around which the humiliated nation could unite. This paper examines one particular myth constructed in the context of l’année terrible, the battle of Loigny, fought on 2 December 1870. The commemoration of Loigny demonstrates the concern to extract heroic lessons from defeat, but also indicates that compensating myths of defeat were not necessarily consensual. The dominant narrative of Loigny was constructed by and resonated with a particular political constituency.

One reason for the potentially divisive nature of war narratives lies in the fact that the Franco-Prussian War involved two successive French regimes - and two successive militaries. Just as the Government of National Defence succeeded the Second Empire, so did its improvised armies succeed the defeated and captive imperial armies. In September 1870 the imperial armies were effectively finished. Marshal Patrice MacMahon’s Army of Châlons, so spectacularly defeated at Sedan, had been charged with the relief of Marshal François-Achille Bazaine’s Army of the Rhine which had become encircled at Metz in August. On 27 October Bazaine capitulated without a fight, surrendering 137,000 men. Nonetheless, there was no shortage of manpower; the chaos of French mobilisation meant that the imperial armies had been incomplete at the hour of their defeat. Over a million men were either serving, training or liable to serve even before, in a conscious echo of 1793, the Government of National Defence decreed the mobilisation of the entire male population between the ages of twenty-one and forty on 2 November.⁵ Fresh armies were raised in the provinces as the Prussians began to besiege Paris on 19 September. 635,000 men were recruited and armed and a further 250,000 men were in training camps by the close of January 1871. This second mobilisation of September 1870-January 1871 typically mobilised between 10 and 15 per cent of men aged between twenty and forty in the brigades of the Garde Nationale mobilisée supplied by each département.⁶ In addition, volunteer franc-tireur companies sprang up; by official calculations over 300 existed, with 57,200 men serving.⁷ Given that the regular army, reserves and the garde mobile had already been pressed into service (though given the slow mobilisation, much of the garde mobile proved to be available for the republican war effort), these figures are impressive.

Yet, this abundance of potential soldiers was matched by neither an adequate supply of competent officers nor of equipment. Moreover, neither the garde mobile nor the mobilisés had anything more than a cursory training; the garde mobile were the better trained, at a rate of an annual fifteen non-consecutive days. Most troops were therefore raw and inexperienced, even if they found themselves lucky enough to be ably commanded and adequately equipped (functioning rifles supplied with the right ammunition could not be expected, given the eighteen types of imported rifles in service, each with a different calibre). Michael Howard argues that the presence of three independent French forces in the provinces might have made the German position untenable, ‘given a high enough standard of professional competence’. Yet this they conspicuously lacked, and as French strategy was predicated on the relief of Paris, they lacked the time to receive the necessary training.⁸ With Paris facing starvation and the republican armies no match for the German forces, an armistice was signed on 28 January. In February a punitive peace was exacted in the shape of a 5 billion franc war indemnity and the loss of Alsace and much of Lorraine, including Metz and Strasbourg. The agony of France was not over, however: in March 1871 the city of Paris rose in revolt against the conservative National Assembly, accused of being monarchist defeatists intent on the overthrow of the Republic. At the end of May 1871 the Army of Versailles invested Paris and at the cost of 20-25,000 lives brought the Paris Commune and l’année terrible to a bloody close. France was left to reflect on the devastation.

The ultimate failure of the efforts of the Government of National Defence and reality of national defeat led to bitter polemics and recriminations as to where ultimate responsibility lay. While Bazaine would be court-martialled, the imperial armies and MacMahon who had led the Army of Châlons would be exonerated and much of the blame attributed to meddling politicians, Charles de Freycinet and Léon Gambetta.⁹ As Howard observes, ‘[t]he failures of amateurs in the second half of the war did much to atone for the failure of the professionals in the first.’¹⁰ The manifestly partisan official enquiry into the actions of the Government of National Defence commissioned by the monarchist-dominated National Assembly in 1871 concluded that the republican government had acted with no regard for public opinion and lacked overall authority. Under this regime demagogic and revolutionary ideas had undermined both the public mood and military discipline.¹¹ Discourses on the causes of the defeat, whether seeking to condemn the Second Empire or the fledgling Republic, were bound up with debates over regeneration of the French nation. In the context of an uncertain political future – with sections of the National Assembly favouring a restoration - arguments over regeneration were linked to questions of regime. Would monarchy or Republic deliver French renewal? Though it has been argued that the memories of what was dubbed l’année terrible were largely suppressed in a ‘collective amnesia’, the political stakes meant that the defeat was omnipresent in political culture.¹² The imposing basilica of the Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre would likewise serve to sustain memories of both the defeat and the Commune. This is not to deny the existence of what might be termed strategies of denial. As we have seen, a selective reading of 1870-71 could identify uplifting narratives of heroic defeat. There were, however, other rather different logics at play in some celebrations of heroism. Heroic conduct might be contrasted with wider failings, feeding into the debates over national regeneration. The values which made some men patriotic, self-sacrificing heroes and others cowards informed ideas of national regeneration. Commemoration could therefore be employed to construct patriotic lessons with a clear political edge. Were, for instance, as Gambetta forcefully argued, Catholic values conducive to a passive acceptance of defeat?¹³ This paper seeks to explore one such episode, the politically-charged commemoration of the battle of Loigny, fought on 2 December 1870.
I
The engagement referred to as Loigny was fought on the bitterly cold 2 December 1870. The wider context was an offensive designed to punch through the German lines, a northward push by the Army of the Loire to link up with a southward breakout by troops trapped in the siege of Paris. If successful, this manoeuvre would lift the siege of Paris and transform the war. On 1 December a dispatch from Paris informed Gambetta that Parisian forces had made a sortie and captured Epinay. Gambetta took this to denote Epinay-sur-Orge, 12 miles south of Paris in the direction of Orléans, recently liberated by the Army of the Loire. This would have marked a significant victory, but the prosaic reality was that the Epinay in question was a small village north of Paris near Saint-Denis, Epinay-sur-Seine. There had been no dramatic breakthrough, no more than a minor exploratory sortie. Gambetta, however, believed that the strategy which he and Freycinet had urged was about to be crowned with success: the Army of the Loire had only to continue its advance from Orléans to deliver the capital. Yet, not only had Louis Trochu, president of the Government of National Defence and commander-in-chief of the Army of Paris, failed to break the German lines - and abandoned any attempt to do so - but the victories of Coulmiers and Villepion had not driven the Prussian and Bavarian forces back in disarray. They had retreated in good order and were in fact intending to counter-attack. The French assault of 2 December duly met fierce resistance and ultimately faltered. By 3 December the northern push had decisively failed and general Louis Aurelle de Paladines, commander of the Army of the Loire, informed Gambetta and Freycinet that not only was the army in retreat, but Orléans would have to be abandoned.

Initially, the brunt of the fighting on 2 December was borne by general Antoine Chanzy’s 16th Corps. Three successive French attacks failed to take the château of Goury. The 3rd division’s advance was halted at the village of Lumeau.¹⁴ The 33rd regiment, the mobiles of Sarthe, were driven back to their original position at Villepion.¹⁵ The left wing of Aurelle de Paladines 15th corps attacked the German flank at Poupry but met the determined resistance of the Prussian 22nd division and proved unable to break the German lines.¹⁶ As the day wore on, Bavarian and Prussian troops recovered to retake the positions from which they had been driven back and by the afternoon the village of Loigny had been invested by Bavarians, though two battalions of the 37th regiment held out in the cemetery. As Chanzy’s forces fell back the 17th Corps was called upon. In a much-discussed action, general Gaston de Sonis decided to turn the tide of battle by retaking Loigny, though the dispersal of the 17th Corps meant that he had relatively few troops at his disposal. Sonis later maintained that his intention was not to lead a charge of several hundred men, but by this example to galvanise the reluctant 51st regiment. He also expected to find his action seconded by the nearby third division, commanded by Pierre Deflandre.¹⁷ In the event, however, the assault compromised of barely 800 troops: the first battalion of the irregular Volontaires de l’Ouest under Athanase de Charette, the irregular franc-tireur battalions of Tours and Blidah and the garde mobile of the Côtes-du-Nord.¹⁸ In the absence of any support, the attack fizzled out and the handful of troops who reached Loigny were soon forced to retreat. Of the 300 Volontaires who charged to the shouts of ‘Vive la France! Vive Pie IX!’ 198 fell. Of fourteen officers only four survived.¹⁹ Charette was injured and taken prisoner. Sonis was left on the battlefield with a shattered knee. The desperate resistance of the battalions of the 37th continued for another two hours at least before they were overwhelmed and taken prisoner - with the exception of a hundred who made a daring escape.²⁰

Although in the stream of memoirs that followed l’année terrible, the actions at Lumeau, Villepion and Goury were not ignored, emphasis was laid on the struggle for Loigny itself. As one memoir observed, there was the sense of a series of separate isolated combats rather than one overall battle. Lumeau, Villepion and Goury were apparently battles in their own right; Ladislas-Xavier Gorecki complained that these names adorned the tombs of the fallen.²¹ The overall effect was to telescope Loigny into the events of the latter part of the day, namely the charge led by Sonis and the stand of the 37th regiment. The myth of Loigny was centred on these events. There was a certain logic to this: taken altogether, the elements of the last hours of 2 December offered ample scope for myth-making. There was the desperate resistance of the two battalions of the 37th in the cemetery, whose spirit was encapsulated in an exchange between the Prussian general Hugo von Kottwitz and colonel de Fouchier. Kottwitz demanded that the French forces should recognise the hopelessness of their position and surrender, to which he received the reply, ‘Monsieur, ce n’est pas mon affaire d’arrêter le feu de mes soldats, c’est la vôtre.’²² The doomed charge of volunteer forces to their aid was an act of sacrifice every bit as heroic as the repeated cavalry charges of Gallifet. The very different forces of the garde mobile of the Côtes du Nord, the first battalion of the Volontaires de l’Ouest and the franc-tireurs of Tours and Blidah (from the French colony of Algeria) found their unity in battle, recognizing their duty as Frenchmen.

The narrative was, however, not entirely unproblematic. Both contemporary critics and later historians have judged Sonis’ actions ill-judged and futile, a needless sacrifice.²³ His charge neither seriously threatened the Prussian and Bavarian forces in Loigny, nor saved the battalions of the 37th, nor succeeded in staving off the collapse of the 51st regiment. The charge only made sense in terms of expiatory self-sacrifice, it was suggested; the general’s Christian convictions and identification with the Volontaires de l’Ouest (‘papal zouaves’) had overtaken his military judgement. ‘M. de Sonis était en proie d’une noble exaltation religieuse et patriotique que partageaient les zouaves pontificaux, mais qui n’avait pas atteint le 51^e’, commented Gorecki.²⁴ Amédée Delorme, a harsher critic, wrote,

Après les malheurs de la patrie, qui apparaissaient comme irréparables à bien des gens, s’immoler à elle, au milieu des zouaves pontificaux, cette pensée, ce rêve d’un Français chrétien, s’était emparé irrésistiblement du général de Sonis et sembla l’avoir frappé de vertige.²⁵
There was also the question of the wisdom of the general in command of the 17th corps choosing to lead a charge in person; abbé Provost, keen to defend his hero, argued that if Gambetta judged this action rash, he clearly overlooked how Caesar and Bonaparte rallied their troops.²⁶ Gorecki, less impressed, noted the impact of the loss of Sonis and argued that a few stretcher-bearers might have made all the difference; had the injured Sonis been carried to Villepion rather than left on the battlefield crucial fresh orders might have been issued.²⁷

According to Sonis’ own report – much cited by his defenders – in the context of the collapse of the 51st regiment and the baffling failure of Deflandre’s third division to appear, he found himself at the head of a charge that he knew was doomed to failure. Retreat was not an option, carrying the risk of the complete collapse and rout of the French forces. Sonis duly proceeded in the spirit of sacrifice:

Je ne voulus point me déshonorer en abandonnant ces trois cent zouaves qui marchaient derrière moi.…Je me sentais fort pour le sacrifice que j’allais accomplir, du consentement de ces braves.… il me parut bon de mourir sous le drapeau qui les abritait.²⁸
Yet, it was no vain sacrifice even in this desperate situation - Sonis argued that at the very least by delaying the victory of their adversaries they covered the retreat of the army. The retreat did not become a general rout pursued and harried by the victorious Germans and the French artillery was not lost to the enemy.²⁹ Writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1894 under the pseudonym Arthur Roë, Patrice Mahon endorsed Sonis’ claim, concluding,
les zouaves pontificaux avaient échoué. Mais quant au résultat de la bataille totale et suivant le jugement que la génération présente peut prononcer, ils avaient réussi. Car la demi-heure précieuse qu'il fallait gagner était conquise et payée de leur sang; les Bavarois s'arrêtaient à Loigny; le 16e corps couchait sur ses positions.³⁰
For Sonis, however, the issue was not so much what he had actually achieved, but what might have been achieved. In a letter sent to Freycinet in late 1871 - cited by his hagiographical biographer, Mgr. Louis Baunard - Sonis developed this argument:
Dans cette marche en avant, j’ai peut-être mérité le reproche d’impétuosité … Mais il fallait à tout prix sauver ce qui était derrière moi, et j’avais le droit d’espérer que la division Deflandre, qui n’était pas loin, et que j’avais envoyé chercher coûte que coûte.…appuierait mon mouvement.…je suis encore convaincu que si chacun avait fait son devoir; si la 3e division m’avait suivi ou s’était portée en avant, même après ma blessure nous nous serions rendus maîtres de Loigny.³¹
Insofar as the charge failed, the reasons lay in the actions - or rather the failure to act - of the 51st regiment and the third division. (Initially the accusation was also levelled against the 48th regiment, as it was mistakenly believed that they had been ranged alongside the 51st and had crumbled like the latter. They were in fact left without orders at Terminiers.)³²

As Sonis’ account remained unpublished (or at least not in a form destined to reach a popular audience - his testimony did of course appear in the official enquiry), it was for his defenders and champions to disseminate these arguments. A notable champion was Mgr. Baunard, rector of the Catholic University of Lille, whose biography of Sonis rested on his unpublished papers.³³ Also, drawing on these papers was an account of the 17th Corps produced by Sonis’ son Henri.³⁴ Yet, well before these accounts appeared the basic arguments were articulated. In 1871 Sauveur Jacquemont, for instance, argued that the retaking of Loigny would have turned the tide of the battle. Had the third division arrived as Sonis had ordered - or had the 51st regiment simply done their duty - then the élan of the charge would have not resulted in patriotic martyrs, but an important strategic gain.³⁵ Henry Morel concurred in his detailed account of Loigny, rejecting any comparison with the futile heroism of the ‘desperate charges at Reichshoffen and Sedan.’³⁶ Morel blamed Gambetta’s dispatch issued on the following day that described Sonis as ‘carried away by his élan’; for Auguste Boucher the dispatch amounted to an insult, a lie and even a crime.³⁷ The military logic was sound, but the troops in question were unsound. The second division of the 51st regiment failed to do their duty. Loigny, in short, according to those who celebrated Sonis’ actions, was (either implicitly or explicitly) a story of heroism betrayed by the cowardice of a section of the French army.³⁸ A key question was posed: what made some men heroes and others - to use Sonis’ words addressed to the recalcitrant 51st - ‘wretches, unworthy of the name of Frenchmen’?³⁹

II
The development of the myth of Loigny was not merely complicated by divided opinion as to whether Sonis’ actions could be justified in military terms and whether Loigny was to be framed in terms of true Frenchmen and unworthy Frenchmen. The unique nature of one of the forces involved was key to the construction of the legend of Loigny. As Sonis’ own words (and words of contemporary admirers and detractors) make clear, Charette’s Volontaires de l’Ouest were commonly known by another name: the papal zouaves. The Volontaires were the successors to the French contingent of the papal zouaves, the multi-national volunteer force who had fought for the cause of the temporal sovereignty of the papacy during the decade 1860-70.⁴⁰ Understood as zouaves, the Volontaires were inextricably entwined with the powerful zouave legend which had developed over the course of the previous decade. This legend comprised of a range of concepts, emphasising expiatory sacrifice, martyrdom, the Catholic identity of France, a Manichean struggle against the forces of the revolution and an intense personal devotion to the Pope. In its emotional dimension and its focus on pain and expiation the legend reflects the mid-century rise of what has been termed a ‘dolourist Catholicism’, as displayed in the Marian devotions.⁴¹ The legend also played upon the heritage of the Vendéen counter-revolution, France’s role in the crusades and the traditions of the French nobility.⁴² Importantly, heroic defeat loomed large in the zouave narrative, starting with the unequal and doomed battle of Castelfidardo where the papal armies were decisively defeated by Piedmont in September 1860.⁴³ To celebrate the zouaves was to celebrate an alternative version of France - a ‘true France’, largely rural, respectful of established hierarchies and faithful to its traditions of Catholicism and monarchism.⁴⁴ In the person of their leader Athanase de Charette de la Contrie, great-nephew of the Vendéen counter-revolutionary François-Athanase de Charette, and relative of the legitimist Pretender, the Comte de Chambord, the royalist and counter-revolutionary associations of the Volontaires were fully apparent.

This is not to say that the Volontaires were simply the French papal zouaves under another name. Patrick Nouaille-Degorce persuasively argues that the Volontaires de l’Ouest were a very different force, recruited under different circumstances and need to be understood as a separate phenomenon.⁴⁵ For one thing, the Volontaires vastly outnumbered the French contingent of zouaves who were repatriated in September 1870 in the wake of the final fall of Rome. By the signing of the armistice there were 2,700 Volontaires - even allowing for re-enlistment of those who had previously served in the zouaves, actual zouaves were no more than a significant minority. (During the protracted negotiations between Charette and the Delegation of Tours over the formation of a zouave franc-tireur force, 178 of the 657 repatriated zouaves joined other army units. Former zouaves the duc Charles d’Albert de Luynes and his brother-in-law the duc Emmanuel de Sabran-Pontevès both fought at Loigny, but as members of the 33rd regiment, the mobiles of Sarthe).⁴⁶ Secondly, self-evidently, in 1870-71 the Volontaires were not at odds with official France as in 1860-70, but were under the authority of the republican Government of National Defence. Nonetheless, all 113 officers were zouaves and it was apparent that Charette considered the two forces to be congruent. In his perspective the Volontaires were above all the servants of the Pope: the dissolution of the regiment in August 1871 sprang from his insistence that the regiment could not simply be integrated into the regular French army. As he explained to the assembled Volontaires, ‘This uniform is the property of the whole Catholic world whose belief we represent; it is the livery of Rome, it is not ours to be disposed of at will and linked to the fortunes of an unstable government.’⁴⁷ Conversely, there were also volontaires who chose to see themselves as zouaves: on enlisting in 1870 Joseph Perraud wrote, ‘Je donnerai avec joie la moitié de mon sang pour la France; mais je voudrais garder toute la reste pour le Pape.’⁴⁸