Michel Ney
January 10, 1769 – December 7, 1815
Marshal of France who commanded the rearguard on the retreat from Moscow and led the French cavalry charges at Waterloo. He was shot for treason after the Bourbon restoration.
Biography
Michel Ney was born in 1769 in Sarrelouis, a French enclave in the German-speaking Saarland, the son of a master cooper, and grew up bilingual. He worked as a notary's clerk and in mines and forges before enlisting in a hussar regiment in 1787.
Rising quickly in the revolutionary army, he fought at Valmy and Neerwinden, became a brigadier general in 1796 and a divisional general in 1799, and served at Hohenlinden in 1800. In 1804 Napoleon made him one of the first Marshals of the Empire. He commanded the VI Corps at Elchingen, Jena and Friedland, campaigned in Spain and Portugal, and during the 1812 invasion of Russia led the rearguard of the retreat, earning the name 'the bravest of the brave' and the title Prince de la Moskowa.
In April 1814 he spoke for the marshals who pressed Napoleon to abdicate, and he was made a peer by Louis XVIII. When Napoleon returned in 1815, Ney was sent to stop him but instead joined him with his troops on 14 March. He commanded the left wing at Quatre Bras and at Waterloo, where his massed cavalry charges failed to break the Allied squares.
Arrested in August 1815, he was tried for treason by the Chamber of Peers after a court-martial declared itself incompetent, refused a defence that he was now Prussian, and was condemned. He was shot by firing squad near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on 7 December 1815.
