"The most embarrassing military defeats in French history?" Topic

Since the English and Americans already got their own, certainly the French deserve one also. They have certainly had their share of both victories and defeats during the history, so there is plenty to pick from. But which was the lost battle that French people found most embarrassing?

Franco-Prussian War…followed closely by 1940. Or vice-versa.

What Sundance said.

Crecy

Agincourt (probably more embarrasing as they really ought to have learnt from Crecy)

Alesia

1940 – all joking aside the rapidity of the collapse still staggers me whenever I read about it

Waterloo

Retreat from Moscow

quite a sad list really.

Bleinheim
Ramillies
Oudenarde
Malplaquet

Pavia ( capture of Francis 1st )

Agincourt
Verneuil
Sluys
Crecy
Poitiers

Trafalgar
Aspern-Essling
Talavera
Bussaco
Fuentes de Onoro
Salamanca
Barrosa
Vitoria
Leipzig
Waterloo

Dien Bien Phu

I don't think that Waterloo was an "embarrassing defeat", rather painful, most certainly.

I agree however that Crecy ranks high in the embarrassment list

There is never any shame in being beaten by Britain/England ;)

Which was the Renaissance/Early Modern battle, with firearms still relatively new, when the just 'victorious' French King lifted the visor of his helm with his pistol barrel and in so doing accidentally, one presumes, blew his brains out?

That must have been a fairly embarrasing one for the after action report…

Still, as we kept consoling ourselves, there is only so much staff officers can do to save commanders from themselves…

Shouldn't this have it's own board?

Which was the Renaissance/Early Modern battle, with firearms still relatively new, when the just 'victorious' French King lifted the visor of his helm with his pistol barrel and in so doing accidentally, one presumes, blew his brains out?

That must have been a fairly embarrasing one for the after action report…

Not a French king , although Charles Viii died after banging his head on a low doorframe

wher e is the battle of the Nile?

Bleinheim
Ramillies
Oudenarde
Malplaquet

This is silly. Most of those were hard fought losses against an equally sized opponent, but nothing disastrous. You'll note after each of those that the Allied forces made basically no progress (in fact the glory put on Marlborough is partly to conceal the Pyrrhic nature of the victories).

In fact your list is mostly famous British victories, rather than embarrassing French defeats.

The four losses to Marlborough pale in insignificance to the loss to Frederick at Rossbach. In that they were totally routed by a much smaller force. Minden was more embarrassing than Blenheim.

Agincourt
Verneuil
Sluys
Crecy
Poitiers

Verneuil? You jest! Again your English bias shows. Sluys was a sea battle, so barely counts to the French, who are not really a naval nation.

Courtrai, where they lost to a bunch of Flemish peasants, not the full professionals of England, was more embarrassing.

Talavera
Bussaco
Fuentes de Onoro
Salamanca
Barrosa
Vitoria

Don't come close to the disaster than was Sedan and 1870.

If you fight a lot of battles, like the French have, you will lose a lot of battles. Of the ones on your list, no Frenchman would be even slightly ashamed of most of them.

Dien Bien Phu, definitely. Agincourt and Crecy, maybe.

Sluys was a sea battle, so barely counts to the French, who are not really a naval nation.

Yeah…just can't understand why such a non-naval nation would spend so long doing international trade by sea and building men'o'war.

Weird.

But yeah, let's agree to not count any losses at sea, like Trafalger, 'cos it's not fair what with the French not really wanting to build ships and be sailors and have an ocean going fleet and all that.

Cool. Cool.

Dien Bien Phu, Agincourt, the retreat from Moscow.

Anybody remember that Haitian Campaign?

A entire army flushed faster than an Ex-Lax sandwich in the dysentery ward.

Oh, and while not a single battle, how about a hundred years or so in North Africa for what return but a way to kill Germans second-hand via the FFL, and a civil war in their own army at the end of the failure in the 1960's.

TVAG

I'm not a historian , but did the French ever win anything worth talking about?

8)

They won the Eurovision one year. Surely that was worth signing about…

Oh, and Agincourt!

Well, they did pretty well in the battles of the Italian wars, although the campaigns generally didn't spin out quite as they would have wished.

They won the Eurovision one year. Surely that was worth signing about…

Ce n'est pas vrais. France a ganger le prix en cinque occassion.

Oui ! 1958, 1960, 1962, 1969, 1977. Oui ! C'est vrais -dans l'anne de Punk !

YouTube link

Although to me it sounds a little too close to :
YouTube link in places.

I'm not a historian , but did the French ever win anything worth talking about?

You're right, you're not an historian.

Just to name a few:

Battle of Rocroi 1643 – ended 150 years of Spanish tactical renown.

Battle of the Chesapeake 1781 – defeated the Royal Navy and made it possible for Washington to capture Cornwallis' army at Yorktown.

Battle of Austerlitz 1805 – a victory which western military forces spent the next 100 years trying to emulate.

Battle of the Marne 1914 – prevented a German victory in 1914.

Battle of Verdun 1916 – bled the German army white and held the line.

Reminds me of the joke:

Q "Why are French roads lined with trees"?

A "Because the German Army likes to march in the shade"

Most embarassing? Gravelotte-St. Privat in 1870. It was so bad that the French commanding marshal was tried for treason after the war!

Jeez.

Another thread peopled largely by folk who Don't Like The French and/or Don't Understand the Word "Embarrassing".

All of them.

Hmm, did the French win anything worth talking about? I'd say HASTINGS was a pretty big victory. Argue that William wasn't French, and I'll wager that Harold wasn't English.

French losses – too many to name, the worst battlefield loss is probably Agincourt in terms of forces facing each other and the overall numbers lost. Most of the rest of the above-list are actually campaigns, which the French lost lots of during their history. Then again, which Empire/nation hasn't lost lots of campaigns?

Greetings

There are defeats in battle, campaign defeats and overall defeat in war.

You would need French sources to identify the most embarrassing defeats from their perspective.

Many of the individual actions already described were hard fought and scarcely embarrassing from a historical perspective. Embarrassment at the time could be indicated by dismissal of the commander concerned (although there could be other reasons for their retention or removal).

Regards

Edward

Bailen surely qualifies as embarrassing?

Jeez.

Another thread peopled largely by folk who Don't Like The French and/or Don't Understand the Word "Embarrassing".

All defeats are embarrassing but the key word in the topic title is surely 'most'.

Pavia (capture of Francis 1st)

Must have been embarrassing to Francis, though I am left to ponder how little portion of the army he led was actually French. Infantry consisted largely of Swiss, Italian and landsknecht mercenaries, though the cavalry arm was more dominated by the native Frenchmen.

Dien Bien Phu

This I would certainly qualify as a textbook example of a very embarrassing defeat. Totally underestimating the capabilities of the enemy, and getting your own forces placed into a position where they ended up being totally isolated and reliant on air supply.

Then again, wasn't a lot of the fighting here done by the Legion Etrangerie and various colonial units?

Verneuil? You jest! Again your English bias shows. Sluys was a sea battle, so barely counts to the French, who are not really a naval nation.

Courtrai, where they lost to a bunch of Flemish peasants, not the full professionals of England, was more embarrassing.

I have no idea which defeat was most embarassing to the French , so I was just listing a few battles.

Verneuil was one the French really should have won , outnumbering the English by c.15000 to c.9000 ; instead it has gone down in history as ' le deuxieme Azincourt '. Having lost one Agincourt is bad , having lost a second one surely must count as being embarassing…

Having thought about it though, Courtrai IS surely the winner IMO , not as big as Sedan or the defeat in 1940 but just as embarassing none the less.

Just to name a few:

Don't forget Magenta and Solferino 1859 – although we know better with hindsight, at the time it was feared that Napoleon III was going to be a new Napoleon I and conquer Europe.

Yorktown. This is assumed by the naive to be a French victory against the hated British, but strategically it was a French defeat of the first order.
This freed Britain to concentrate on France in the next bunch of wars that are lumped under the catch-all of "Napoleonic".
Thus, Britain was free to defeat the French at Trafalgar, and 10 years later to trounce the French at Waterloo, with a little bit of help from the Prussians, who were allowed to pursue a beaten foe and help round up prisoners and stragglers.

I would think calling Yorktown a strategic defeat is somewhat simplistic. More properly, it could be said to have had geo-political implications.

However, if one should wish to extrapolate, Yorktown insured that in 1918 a US army would be available to help the French win the war against the Germans and then do it again 25 years later. That would seem to be brilliant planning on the part of the French.

It's easy to say the French were defeated, but in the case of Louis XIV and the Revolutionary Wars it took most of the rest of Europe to bring the French to a standstill.

Surrounded on all sides by potential enemies, some of them world powers at one time or another, they did pretty well. Had the US or Britain been continental with such neighbours, things might have been a bit less glorious for them.

As for the worst French defeat, Sedan opened the way for Germany to become the dominant nation in Europe. Bismarck had his back fully covered in 1870 and nobody dared to rise against Germany. So it eclipses 1940 because Hitler had nothing but enemies to contend with.

Indeed , France did actually win the War of the Spanish Succession as Phillippe D'Anjou succeeded to the throne of Spain. We can talk about the defeats of the 100 Years War but it was France that won , and despite the defeats of 1940 she was on the winning side in WW2.

The loss of Alsace and Lorraine was embarassing after the Franco-Prussian war , but both these provinces were recovered and are still part of France today.

Bailen.

Although it's my pet project, I think that Fishguard counts as pretty flippin' embarrassing.

Gentlemen – we have our winner !

Fishguard…explain that one away !

Cheers 20th Maine! I don't care what they say about you, you're ok with me. ;o)

For France, as a nation state, the more embarrasing defeats were Rossbach (due the dismail performance of the French high command at the battle) Bailén (a perceived second rate army, that should have been defeated), Dien Bien Phu (native forces) and, perhaps, Argelia (as with Dien Bien Phu).

I don't believe that the other defeats mentioned would qualify as embarrassing. While they hurted France, they were fought against great powers, whose armies were justly famous for their prowess in the battlefield (no same when you loss against a tougher enemy).

Maybe 1870 and 1940 would qualify too. In the first case, the French high command messed up things so badly that made a bad joke of the French soldiers bravery and sacrifice… if well commanded they would have been able to give the Germans a tougher run for their money. The same can be said about 1940, as French army was thought, at the time, as stronger than the German army. Although I believe they would be more accurately defined as humiliating, rather than embarrassing.

Cheers 20th Maine! I don't care what they say about you, you're ok with me. ;o)

Thanks ! I hear nothing but good about you !

I was musing on Fishguard this morning and it occured to me that if this had been recorded in the Illiad (say) then we'd probably label it as a fanciful tale made up to humiliate the defeated side in some half forgotten conflict. The events of Fishguard have that "wooden horse" level of being so extremely unlikley it's hard to believe it could be anything but invented. And yet, it's true.

Fishguard has got to be a contender…

Fishguard is a contender, but consider they were basically throw-away troops, commanded by a renegade American, dropped off to stir up trouble. But yes, between getting rounded up by pitchfork wielding Amazons, to getting wasted on shipwrecked port, to surrending to an "army" of local spectators, it was a pretty cocked up affair.

Amazons may be over stretching it welsh-costume.co.uk

But they probably had a really stern stare.

Hah! I've lured you in… Fishguard: The Wargame – link

You know you want to… It's only a matter of time before my pestering of Alan Perry pays off.. He'll make a fortune selling multipose plastic Welsh ladies with assorted weaponry (or daffs for the less warlike) in castle gift-shops up and down the land…

20th Maine, I'll see your Welsh lady and raise you this Jemima Nicholas re-enactor: link

As 21eRegt can no doubt confirm (having been on the receiving end of her pitchfork at least once), she was bloody terrifying (and had gravity-defying bosoms that alone could engulf entire skirmish screens).

Cinco De Mayo

Beat by the Mexican Army

Well if you mean EMBARRASSING, how about Fishguard?

Defeated by a few Welsh women. It doesn't get more embarrassing that that.

And Yes Baylen was definitely a bad hair day. NOBODY loses to the Napoleonic Spanish army.

And Agincourt. There can be no greater testimonial to a dodgy defeat than the battlefield site being hushed up by the home team, the name concealed, and no museums, ice cream vendors or fritures for miles.

Its not really fair to comment on the French Foreign Legion. Apart from the fact that they arent quite French, they only get deployed when its time to get killed. They Never win. Although they did get a big hand in the Mexican wars – it was wooden, I recall.

"Hmm, did the French win anything worth talking about? I'd say HASTINGS was a pretty big victory."

Not French though, Norman. Normandie was quite distinct from France in 1066, and the Normans were Norse descendants, not French. Whatever Harold was, is irrelevant to the question.

Too many to mention. But my favorite embarrassing defeat has to be Nicopolis 1396….