But what need was there to go into details? The official drafting of the bill, safeguarded morality and the gaminghouses at the same time. With the result that for many years to come one would still see, round the green tables, madmen trying their luck, foolish old women selling their jewels and piles of louis disappearing under the nimble rakes of the croupiers.
CHAPTER XVIII. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE EPIC
The misfits of glory — Recalcitrants and deserters — The Army as seen by Paris — Mars on the spree — When an officer wants to read the paper-Junot and the picket-A man who knew how to address the ladies
AIHARMING picture by Boilly, to be seen at the Musee Carnavalet, shows the Paris conscripts of 1807 march* ing past the Porte Saint-Denis.
With cockades stuck on their hats they march gaily along, under the leadership of a handsome fellow with a theatrical carriage, who might be twin brother to Elleviou. 1 Carriages and riders have drawn up to let the little company pass; sightseers line the way, with street-urchins pushing through to the front; women smile to the departing youths, and the latter display such high spirits that it would take little more to make the crowd follow them. Was the prospect of donning a uniform to go and risk their lives on the banks of the Niemen or the Vistula so attractive as all that?
A popular song-writer of the day seems to have doubted it. He says:
'The gaiety of this regiment Is worthy of censure. Conscripts leaving gaily Is quite against nature/
We shall see that the rhymester was right, and that in reality the Imperial recruits pulled very different faces when it came to shouldering their knapsacks.
In the ranks of the Napoleonic army the number of hardened fighters was legion; you could find thousands of grenadiers like Coignet, fusiliers like Fricasse, sergeants like Bourgogne, hussars like Bangofsky, cavalrymen like Parquin, trumpeters like Chevillet, all more or less related to the illustrious Flambeau whom Edmond Rostand placed at their head. But alongside these heroes who rushed into battle as if to a festival, it must be confessed that there existed a crowd of less brilliant soldiers, not to mention many poor devils who had never had but one ambition: not to be soldiers at all.
These rebellious victims of conscription had been heard of ever since the Consulate. In Paris, in 1802, the town hall of the sixth arrondissement was the scene of a regular riot while the drawing of lots was proceeding. Some of the youths fought the dragoons, who made use of their arms. About fifty wounded and twenty dead were left on the field, among them mere onlookers, old men and children. One poor youngster of twelve got a sword-thrust in the belly, 'in spite of the protests of the spectators', as the Minister of Justice so gracefully expresses it.
A number of violent incidents were also reported from the provinces. In the little town of Montereau-Faut-Yonne the troops had to go into action. At Chartres, a little later, three gendarmes were butchered. At Brussac, in the Ariege, several individuals armed themselves with stones and knives to come to the assistance of the conscripts. Not to mention the departments of the Quest, Morbihan, Finisterre, Les Sables, where the rebels formed themselves into gangs and attacked the mounted police. To escape recruitment, many a poor devil mutilated himself, cutting off one of his fingers, or ruining one of his eyes with a poisonous powder sold by a certain Tais-siere, student of medicine. Wily fellows managed to procure false certificates of discharge by bribing some military surgeon. But many of them followed a simpler procedure: they did not answer the call-up. Out of two hundred and forty-four conscripts due to assemble on the Place des Vosges on the 25th Prairial, year XI, only fifty-eight put in an appearance, and that the proportion should have been so small does not seem to have greatly surprised the authorities.
One way or another, however, the recruitment was completed, and the young soldiers started off to join their corps. But how many of them would disappear at the first turning? It was reckoned that about a tenth of the recruits escaped in this way. The gendarmerie had all the more difficulty in recapturing them in that the population, more often than not, lent them assistance; for at that time desertion was considered only a venial sin. The poor wretches were pitied for being brought on to the strength against their will; they were hidden at their request, and rescued by force if need be.
A state of mind that offends our ideas of today, and was perhaps at first merely a survival of the old regime, for conscription was of recent invention. 1 But it was soon detested on its own account, as its exactions increased.
For at first the armies that accomplished such great things were not very large. It is even difficult to believe the modest figures to which the system of exemption and buying out reduced the proportion of the mobilized troops. In 1806 there were only 14,300 Parisians serving under the flag, out of a population of 547,000: one man in thirty-eight was a soldier — and this in the year of Jena.
But the day was near when the war would become far greedier, when the total mobilization would greatly exceed a million, and Napoleon, recalling young men who had been exempted or bought out, and calling up the classes in advance, would seek recruits even in the schools.
Then, as the blood tax became really onerous, desertions and refusals to serve increased to an alarming degree. In 1810 it was admitted that 16,000 recalcitrants had been personally convicted, and their families obliged to pay 170 millions in fines. By the end of another two years the countryside was teeming with absentees. Flying columns pursued them and captured 60,000, who were sent to the main army; but they had hardly been taken on before they began escaping again. De Segur estimated the number of deserters at more than a thousand a day; Thiers declared that 150,000 men had already left their corps, one month after the crossing of the Niemen; and Albert Sorel reckoned that henceforth 'it would take almost an army to recruit another one*.
It is easy to imagine the little dramas being enacted at that time in an untold number of villages: the officers of the Consulate on half-pay, the disaffected soldiers of yesterday and the day before, who had begun trailing their dirty uniforms and down-at-keels boots along the roads, plying more or less avowable trades, were now joined by the mass of deserters. The farmer's son went to ground in the barn, the miller's son in the mill; they were fed in secret, since they did not dare show their noses out of doors; always on the look-out for the gendarme, for the sound of a trotting horse along the road, fleeing from the terrible brigades beating the woods and thickets and running after them like a pack of hounds.
1 It was established by the law of Fructidor, Year II, voted on the report by Jourdan. Bonaparte was to make better use of this tool, forged by the Revolution, than anybody else.
We look in vain for this aspect of the great epic in Raffet's lithographs, and we are far indeed from the joyous conscripts of 1807, marching along the boulevards with tricolour streamers on their coats and a flower between their teeth!
Had the painters agreed among themselves to show us the everyday life of the First Empire under false colours?