FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR 1870-71

1870

• 19^th July: France declares war on Prussia over succession to Spanish throne and threat of Prussian unification of Germany
• 12^th August: Prussia occupies Alsace and Lorraine
• 2^nd September: Battle of Sedan. French have 38,000 killed, wounded or captured. Napoleon III and 104,000 remaining men surrender to the Prussians
• 4^th September: Republic formed in Paris to continue defence against Prussians
• 19^th September: Paris besieged by Prussian Army; only contact with outside is by balloon
  
  

  1871

• 18^th January: Paris is starving and falls to Prussian Army
• 28^th January: Armistice is signed at Versailles
• 6^th February: Ceasefire is declared
• 18^th March: Communard revolution in Paris – Civil War
• 28^th May: French Army recaptures Paris bloodily from Communards

DEFENCE OF CHERBOURG 1870-71

1870

• 9^th September: The French Republic decides to defend the naval base at Cherbourg, at the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy, from the Prussians, as an alternative capital of France
• 28^th September: All local men to 40 years are conscripted and issued with British Enfield Snider .577 rifles and carbines; few have uniforms or boots. The French Chassepot rifles are superior to the Prussian Dreyse needle-fire rifles but few are available in Normandy
• 26^th October: Work starts on a defence line across the Cotentin Peninsula at its narrowest point, the 14 km from Portbail in the west to the marais (marshes) at St. Sauveur de Pierrepont and batteries are set up on the northern borders of the marais at likely crossing places all the way east to Carentan
• French defence artillery consists of 16cm and 30cm bronze rifled muzzle-loading pieces with half the range of Prussian breech-loading Krupp steel artillery and with much lower rates of fire and accuracy.
• 20,000 men are stationed in hastily-built barracks along the 14km defence line
• It’s a severe winter and many soldiers and locals die of epidemics of small-pox and typhoid
  
  

  1871

• 7^th March: French conscripts begin being disbanded after ceasefire
• April: Among those who die of disease at Denneville are my great great great great aunt Rosalie Le Mouton’s two sons and her brother.

Why did my great great great great aunt Rosalie Le Mouton lose her sons Pierre and Isidor and then her brother Jean all within three weeks of one another in Denneville on the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy, in April 1871?
What happened to cause such a tragedy when the Franco-Prussian War had not come within many kilometres of Denneville?
While we were visiting family in Normandy we purchased the most detailed books written about the history of this beautiful countryside to help us understand this period of its history.
Of course it was to be bitterly fought over twice more in the two world wars that followed.

This is how we first learnt of the 1870-71 Ligne fortifiée du camp retranché du Cotentin which was built across the very 14 km of the Normandy countryside from which my ancestry comes.

The War literally came to Rosalie’s doorstep.

It must have been frightening enough to know the Prussian army was getting ever closer, but to suddenly find her countryside was the focus of intense military fortification must have been doubly alarming.
All the parishes across and north of the fortified line to Cherbourg were declared to be “in a state of permanent requisition”.
The influx of huge numbers of troops into the locality was devastating, not only with the construction of the defensive earthworks and barracks but also by laying waste the fields on whose produce they subsisted.

Six thousand men were now living across the fields where Rosalie’s family lived and worked. The militias’ need for land, food and firewood stripped the countryside. Their arrival was made worse when combined with unusually wet and cold weather through the winter of 1870-71 and into the spring of 1871.
Everyone was struggling.

Some of Rosalie’s family had already left her village of Denneville for the safety of British Jersey in 1870 before this swarm of men – soldiers, sailors and later, returning prisoners, who also brought with them an epidemic of diseases which spread into the villages.
Parishes bordering both sides of the defence line where our ancestors lived recorded high loss of life to parishioners in 1871.

Father Francois Portais, Curate of Canville-la-Roque, just north of the defensive Line says, in his summation of that terrible year that smallpox, typhoid and scarlet fever plagued his parish and neighbouring parishes.
“The parish is still suffering from the presence of troops who are occupying the most important line of defence from Portbail to Carentan. Some of the troops are stationed in the old parish of Omonville-la-Folliot in the camp called d’Yons, whilst the rest, comprising navy gunners, are at St. Sauveur de Pierrepont and look after the three artillery batteries designated to defend the line called La Pélérine.”

Rosalie was not new to suffering of this sort.
She had already lost her first son Francois at the age of 16yrs in 1852 and her second son Placide, also a soldier, in 1859.
Suffering now found Rosalie again. Her grief is unrecorded. Her men Pierre, Isidor and Jean were not killed heroically in battle, fighting for the defence of their homeland, but struck down by disease in the course of the French Republic’s undoubtedly hopeless efforts to defend Cherbourg from an invasion that never took place.

Pauline Kidd (neé Le Mouton)