Jacques Macdonald

Jacques Macdonald was born at Sancerre, in the Cher, on 17 November 1765. His father, Neil MacEachain MacDonald, was a squire of the MacDonald clan of Uist, in Scotland. After Bonnie Prince Charlie's defeat at Culloden (1746), Neil had followed Prince Charles Edward Stuart in his flight to France, where he settled as a tutor and language teacher. The family established itself among the minor French nobility, but Jacques grew up with the memory of the Highlands and the awareness of belonging to two worlds: that of the Jacobite exiles and that of the officers of the Ancien Régime.

Enlisted in the Irish Foreign Legion — a corps with Jacobite traditions — then in the royal army, Macdonald bridged his Nordic heritage with the career the Revolution would reshape. In 1792, he joined the Army of the North and fought at Jemappes under Dumouriez. When the Convention purged generals suspected of aristocratic sympathies, Macdonald escaped accusations thanks to his reputation as a competent officer and his foreign origins: French nobility was not attributed to him. He rose rapidly through the ranks. In 1798, he commanded in Italy in place of Championnet, then served under Moreau on the Rhine.

In 1799, the Italian campaign gave him the most exposed corps: at the Trebbia, he faced Suvorov. The defeat was crushing — Macdonald retreated before the old Russian general's tactical genius — but he brought his troops back in order, avoiding complete disaster. This methodical retreat, in a desperate situation, revealed his true nature: he was not a general of the lightning breakthrough, but a tenacious organiser who won through endurance. The early Consulate years, however, kept him at the margins. Suspected of being too close to Moreau — condemned for conspiracy in 1804 — he languished in secondary postings. Napoleon held a grudge. It would take until 1809 and a unique opportunity for the general to regain the Emperor's favour.

On 5 July 1809, the Grand Army crossed the Danube at the island of Lobau. The following day, the two armies clashed on the Marchfeld plain north of Vienna. Archduke Charles had stretched a line of 120,000 men across a 25-kilometre front. In the centre, the Austrians held the villages of Wagram, Aderklaa and Süssenbrunn. Napoleon sought to break through this line before Archduke John could reinforce his brother from Hungary. He needed to strike hard and fast.

It was in this context that Macdonald received the mission that would change his life. He would command a column of forty thousand men — three divisions — arrayed in a massive square formation roughly two thousand men across and twenty ranks deep. The objective: cross the open plain, weather the crossfire of Austrian artillery, and break through the Archduke's centre. The manoeuvre was perilous in the extreme. Staff officers deemed it suicidal. The column would have to advance under a hail of cannonballs across several kilometres of bare terrain.

Macdonald executed it. On 6 July, at midday, the column moved off. The losses were terrifying: between five and eight thousand men fell in a few hours, killed or wounded by Austrian fire. But the mass advanced. It disrupted the enemy centre, enabling Davout to outflank on the right and Masséna to manoeuvre on the left. The Archduke ordered a retreat. Wagram was a decisive victory. Napoleon galloped towards Macdonald, embraced him and handed him the marshal's baton on the battlefield. He told him — according to several accounts — : "I owe you this victory." Macdonald also received the title of Duke of Taranto, a reference to the Italian port city he had administered in previous campaigns. His troops, bled white but victorious, held him in admiration mingled with awe.

In 1812, Macdonald commanded the 10th Corps during the Russian campaign, on the northern flank towards Riga. Without managing to take the port city, he held his position methodically and brought his men back during the retreat without the disordered panic that decimated other corps. In 1813, following the Grand Army's debacle, Napoleon entrusted Macdonald with the command of a forces group in Silesia, facing Prussia and Blücher's army — the old hussar, as he was nicknamed, tireless, aggressive, driven by a visceral hatred of Napoleonic France.

On 26 August 1813, Macdonald received orders to attack. His situation was difficult: his troops were exhausted, incessant rain had turned the Katzbach into a torrent, the artillery was bogged down in mud and practically unusable. Blücher attacked first, outflanking the French on both sides simultaneously. The battle quickly turned into disaster. Caught between the river and the Prussians, the French soldiers could neither form their ranks nor manoeuvre. Thousands drowned while fleeing across the swollen river. The defeat was total: Macdonald lost twenty-five thousand men — killed, wounded, prisoners — and one hundred and thirty guns. It was one of the worst defeats of the German campaign.

Napoleon did not publicly blame him. Orders had been given, circumstances had been unfavourable, Blücher had proved faster and more brutal than expected. Macdonald rebuilt his forces and participated in the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig (16-19 October 1813). During Leipzig's catastrophic retreat, when the bridge over the Elster was blown prematurely, he attempted to swim across the river — he survived. In 1814, he defended the Empire's frontiers with desperate courage, falling back before the Coalition armies converging on Paris. Capitulation could not be avoided.

In April 1814, Napoleon abdicated at Fontainebleau. Macdonald was among the marshals present during those painful days. He accompanied Empress Marie-Louise and her son towards Vienna, a mission he accomplished with exemplary discretion. When Louis XVIII ascended the throne, Macdonald swore an oath of loyalty. His relations with the imperial regime had never been free of ambiguity — the sidelining of the 1804-1808 years, caused by his supposed closeness to Moreau, had left him with an underlying bitterness — but he chose Bourbon legitimacy without ostentation or apparent calculation.

In March 1815, Napoleon landed at the Gulf of Juan and marched towards Paris in less than twenty days. Macdonald was with King Louis XVIII when the latter fled to Ghent. This choice, unlike Ney's dramatic rejoining of the Eagle before dying before a firing squad, earned him retention of his functions after Waterloo. Louis XVIII made him a peer of France and appointed him Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour, first Governor of Lyon and then Inspector General of Troops. This honourable end to his career, amid the discreet splendours of the restored monarchy, contrasted with the fate of his former companions: Ney before the firing squad, Murat executed at Pizzo, Davout in disgrace then painfully rehabilitated.

Macdonald died at Courcelles-le-Roi, in the Loiret, on 25 September 1840. He left posthumous memoirs — Souvenirs du maréchal Macdonald — which give a nuanced portrait of Napoleon: an undeniable genius, but a sometimes unjust master, capable of abandoning his most loyal servants when politics demanded it. Posterity has retained the Wagram column, that moment of collective bravery when forty thousand men advanced under fire on the orders of a Jacobite's son with two homelands — French at heart, Scottish by blood, marshal through sacrifice.