Achille Bazaine

Achille Bazaine rose from private soldier to Marshal of France and was convicted of treason for surrendering an intact army and the fortress of Metz. He enlisted at twenty after failing the entrance examination for the military academy, and made his career in Algeria, in the Foreign Legion, in Spain and in the Crimea, where he was one of the few French commanders whose reputation survived. He commanded the French expeditionary force in Mexico from 1863, took Puebla and Mexico City, installed Maximilian on the throne and then watched the enterprise disintegrate: the Mexican republic under Juarez never stopped fighting, the United States ended its own civil war and objected, and Napoleon III withdrew the army in 1867, leaving Maximilian to be shot. Bazaine had married a Mexican wife and had been accused of freelancing towards a throne of his own, which was probably unfair and was widely believed. In 1870 he was given the Army of the Rhine, some 180,000 men, was beaten in a series of battles around Metz that he conducted without conviction, and allowed himself to be shut up in the fortress, where he negotiated with Bismarck as a possible strongman for a restored empire while France fought on. He surrendered on 27 October 1870 with 180,000 unbeaten soldiers. Court-martialled in 1873, sentenced to death, commuted to twenty years, he escaped from the Ile Sainte-Marguerite the following year, helped by his wife, and died in poverty in Madrid. Whether he was a traitor or merely a defeatist of remarkable stubbornness has been argued ever since. The court found that he had surrendered without doing everything duty required, which is a narrower charge than treason and the one the evidence supports. France needed somebody to blame for 1870 and he was the most available candidate.

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