French Cuirassiers: Napoleon’s Heavy Cavalry at the Charge (NAP0042)

French cuirassiers: a charge is a formation, not a rush

The squadrons are already at speed and the swords are still upright: this is the instant before contact, when the line still has to be a line. Steel helmets with brass crests and black horsehair manes, red epaulettes, an officer in dark blue riding out on the flank to hold the pace — and behind him the regiment stretching back to the horizon. What is painted here is not enthusiasm. It is a formation moving at a speed somebody chose.

The trot, not the gallop

The instinct is to picture a charge as a headlong gallop across open ground. Heavy cavalry did close to the opposite: it came on at a collected trot and lengthened stride only in the last hundred metres or so. The reason is arithmetic rather than courage — a line that gallops for half a mile arrives strung out, blown, and as single riders instead of a wall. Cuirassiers were not trying to arrive quickly. They were trying to arrive together, because the entire effect depends on hitting as one object.

What the cuirass actually stopped

Breastplate and backplate weighed something like eight kilos and paid for themselves in a very narrow band: they turned a sword cut, a lance point, and a musket ball that had already spent most of its energy. Against a ball fired at close range they were no use at all, and everyone involved knew it. The armour was worth wearing anyway — partly for the mêlée, where cuts come from every direction, and partly for what the sight of it did to the men waiting on the other side.

Big men on big horses

A cuirassier regiment was expensive in a way that is easy to miss. The men were chosen for height and weight, the horses had to be heavy enough to carry an armoured rider and still close at speed, and both took years to produce. Remounts of that quality came from Normandy, the Franche-Comté and Germany, and there were never enough of them. A light cavalryman could be trained in a season; this could not.

The last hundred metres

Everything is decided in the final seconds. Infantry that keeps its square and holds its fire until the range is short will almost always stop the charge, because horses will not run into a hedge of bayonets. Infantry caught changing formation, or firing too early, is finished. The cuirassiers’ job was to be there at the exact moment somebody’s nerve went — which is why they were held back and committed late, and why a general who spent them early had nothing left to spend.

A weapon that could not be replaced

The heavy cavalry survived the battles and did not survive the distances. After 1812 the men could be found again but the horses could not, and a cuirassier without the right horse is simply a heavy man carrying a sword designed to be used from the saddle. The regiments riding in this plate were rebuilt on paper after Russia, and never again on the ground.