White Terror and execution of Ney

In March 1815 Ney, rallied to the Bourbons and made a peer of France, set out from Besançon to arrest Napoleon and promised Louis XVIII to bring him back 'in an iron cage'. On 14 March, at Lons-le-Saunier, he read his troops a proclamation joining the Emperor.

He then commanded the left wing at Quatre-Bras and the assault on the centre at Waterloo, where five horses were killed under him. After the defeat he tried to disappear in the Lot; he was recognised and arrested on 3 August 1815.

The court martial assembled to try him declared itself incompetent — the marshals composing it would not condemn one of their own. The case was sent to the Chamber of Peers, where former servants of the Empire sat as peers of the king.

The defence argued that Ney, born at Saarlouis, had become a foreigner under the treaty that had just ceded the town: the argument was set aside, Ney himself repudiating it. On 6 December the Chamber condemned him to death by a very large majority; a minority voted for deportation.

The execution took place the next morning near the Observatory, in a deliberately discreet spot to avoid a crowd. Ney refused the blindfold, told the firing party to aim at his heart, and gave the order to fire himself.

He died at the height of the White Terror that followed the Hundred Days: General de La Bédoyère had been shot in August, Murat in Italy in October, Brune murdered at Avignon. Ney is the most illustrious victim of that wave, and the one whose memory would return soonest: in 1853 a statue by Rude would be raised on the site of his execution.