It happened on 7 November:
1870 - Thirty-eight volunteers from Haut-Marnais and Meuse were killed in a wood between Marault and Brethenay.
At 5pm on 7 November 1870, two inhabitants of Marault, François-Antoine Maigrot and schoolteacher Henri-Louis-Eugène Leseur, came to the town hall to report to Mayor Jean-Baptiste Michel that 38 men had been killed between 2pm and 4pm in La Chesnoye wood, on the road to Brethenay.
The men, they said, were "dressed in the uniform of the 2nd company of scouts mobilised from the Haute-Marne".
More than a battle, it was a massacre involving these men from the Haut-Marnais and Meuse who belonged to the Volontaires de la Haute-Marne, a unit raised from 22 September 1870 by Captain (and later Commander) Pierre-Nicolas Bonnette (1831-1893), who was born in Pancey and worked as a butcher in Andelot.
This volunteer unit, set up after the fall of Napoleon III and the proclamation of the Republic, was made up of four companies: the 1st under Captain Charles Tridant, the 2nd under Captain Charles-Hippolyte Dubos (police commissioner in Ancerville and then Montiers-sur-Saulx), the 3rd under Captain Jules Vallet and the 4th under Captain Victor Fèvre (unpublished information from a file held by the Haute-Marne Departmental Archives).
These men had first fought the day before, on 6 November, at Provenchères-sur-Marne, in a battle designed to halt the advance of German troops towards Chaumont.
The casualties of the battle at Marault belonged to the Dubos company (not Dubosque). Taken prisoner, the men were literally massacred after one of them fired on a Prussian.
Among them was a distant relative of #Napoléon Bonaparte: Captain André-Napoléon Levie-Ramolino, born in Ajaccio (Corsica) on 27 April 1834.
The officer was the son of Mr Levie (André Ramolino's godson), who was authorised in 1837 to add the surname Ramolino to his name. This André Ramolino was the first cousin of Letizia Ramolino, wife of Bonaparte, the Emperor's mother.
Promoted to lieutenant in August 1868, Levie-Ramolino belonged to the 55th Regiment of Line Infantry when the 1870 war broke out. He was serving alongside the volunteers from Haute-Marne when he was killed at the age of 36.
Among those who survived was Corporal Paulin-Casimir Labarrère, aged 20, from Vavincourt (Meuse), who was hit in the left eye by a bayonet and in the left wrist by a gunshot, and received 20 sabre blows that were not serious!
The next day, the Prussians entered Chaumont. Most of the operations then took place on the outskirts of Langres.
A monument "donated by the members of the Société amicale et patriotique des combattants haut-marnais" commemorates the unfortunate victims of the Bois de la Chesnoye massacre.
Monument de la Chesnoye
