Of all the soldiers who rose to greatness under Napoleon Bonaparte, Michel Ney remains perhaps the most compelling and tragic figure. Born the son of a craftsman, he climbed through the ranks of the French Army by sheer ability and physical courage, became one of the original eighteen Marshals of the Empire, and earned a reputation as the bravest of the brave from Napoleon himself. His story ends not in battle but before a firing squad in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris, a victim of the same restored Bourbon monarchy he had once sworn to serve.
Michel Ney was born on 10 January 1769 in Sarrelouis, a French enclave in the predominantly German region of Saarland, along the French-German border. His father, Pierre Ney, was a master cooper who had served in the Seven Years War, and his mother was Marguerite Greiveldinger. Growing up bilingual in French and German, Ney was educated at the Collège des Augustins in Sarrelouis until 1782, after which he worked as a clerk in a notary's office and later in mines and forges. Civilian life did not suit his temperament, and in 1787 he enlisted in the Colonel-General Hussar Regiment.
Under the Ancien Régime, advancement to the officer corps was restricted to men who could prove four quarterings of nobility, meaning at least two generations of aristocratic birth. Ney had no such credentials, but the French Revolution swept those restrictions away. Continuing to serve in what became the French Revolutionary Army and then the Army of the North, he was commissioned as an officer in October 1792, shortly after seeing action at the Battle of Valmy in September. He was wounded at the Siege of Mainz in 1793 and participated in the Battle of Neerwinden the same year. In August 1796 he was promoted to brigadier general, commanding cavalry on the German fronts.
His courage in action bordered on recklessness. On 17 April 1797, during the Battle of Neuwied, he led a cavalry charge against Austrian lancers who were trying to capture French artillery. The lancers were driven back, but Ney's own cavalry were then counter-charged by Austrian heavy cavalry. During the ensuing melee he was thrown from his horse and captured near the municipality of Dierdorf. He was exchanged for an Austrian general on 8 May. His promotion to général de division followed on 28 March 1799. Later that year he commanded cavalry in the armies of Switzerland and the Danube, where he was wounded in the thigh and wrist at Winterthur. He fought at Hohenlinden under General Jean Victor Marie Moreau in December 1800, one of the battles that effectively ended the War of the Second Coalition.
Napoleon recognized Ney's exceptional qualities early. On 19 May 1804, Ney received his marshal's baton, becoming one of the original eighteen Marshals of the Empire created on that date. In the 1805 campaign he commanded the VI Corps of the Grande Armée and was praised for his performance at Elchingen, which gave him one of his two titles: Duke of Elchingen. He saw further action at Jena in 1806 and Eylau in 1807. His second title, Prince de la Moskowa, came from his conduct at the Battle of Borodino in September 1812 during the disastrous invasion of Russia.
The Russian campaign produced Ney's finest and most celebrated hour. After the catastrophic retreat from Moscow began, he commanded the French rearguard, fighting a series of desperate actions against pursuing Russian forces while the main body of the Grande Armée disintegrated around him. He became separated from the main army and was reported dead by Napoleon himself, only to emerge from the Russian wilderness having kept his command together through a combination of tactical skill and sheer personal ferocity. It was after this campaign that Napoleon called him le brave des braves, the bravest of the brave, a title that followed him for the rest of his life.
Napoleon's defeat by the Sixth Coalition in 1814 placed Ney in an agonizing position. He had served the Emperor faithfully for two decades, but he was also a marshal of France with soldiers' lives in his hands, and he recognized that continued resistance was futile. He became one of the most prominent marshals to pressure Napoleon to abdicate, and he subsequently pledged his allegiance to the restored Bourbon monarchy. When Napoleon escaped from Elba in March 1815 and marched north, Louis XVIII sent Ney to stop him, reportedly boasting that he would bring Napoleon back to Paris in an iron cage. Instead, on 14 March 1815, Ney joined Napoleon with his entire force, a defection that electrified Europe.
At the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815, Ney commanded the French cavalry and infantry attacks on the British lines with the kind of reckless heroism that had defined his career. The attacks failed, Wellington held, and the arrival of Prussian forces sealed Napoleon's defeat. Ney reportedly had five horses shot from under him during the battle. When the final French collapse came, he attempted to find death in the fighting, but survived.
He was arrested by the Bourbon government and tried for treason in November 1815. He appealed to a provision of the Treaty of Paris that he claimed gave him French citizenship and exempted him from royalist justice, but the appeal was rejected. His fellow marshals declined to defend him on the military tribunal, and he was tried by the Chamber of Peers. On 7 December 1815, in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, Michel Ney was executed by firing squad. He refused a blindfold, placed his hand over his own heart to show the soldiers where to aim, and gave the order to fire himself. He was forty-six years old.
