Adrien Jean Baptiste François Bourgogne was the son of a cloth-merchant of Condé-sur-Escaut (Nord). He reached his twentieth year on November 12th, 1805, a time when military glory was the one dream of youth. To make this dream real, his father procured his admission into a corps of the Vélites of the Guard, where a fixed income was a necessary qualification.
The Vélites were originally Roman soldiers lightly armed, for skirmishing with the enemy (velitare). In the year XII. when the Revolution was at an end, two corps of Vélites, consisting of 800 men each, were attached to the foot Grenadiers, and to the mounted Grenadiers of the Consul’s Guard.
By a decree of April 15th, 1806, 2,000 new Vélites were levied, and two battalions were attached to each of the arms composing the Guards. M. Gabriel Cottreau says that these additions were made to the Old Guard only. They were distributed among the Grenadiers and the Chasseurs à pied, as well as among the cavalry regiments of Chasseurs, Grenadiers, and Empress’s Dragoons.
In times of peace each cavalry regiment had attached to it a squadron of Vélites made up of troops of 125 men each, and each infantry regiment a battalion of two companies of 150 Vélites each. The uniform worn by the Vélites was always that of the corps into which they were drafted.
In 1809 the Emperor took a battalion of Vélites from the Fusiliers-Grenadiers to serve as a body-guard for the Grand-Duchess of Tuscany at Florence. This battalion still counted as belonging to the Imperial Guard; it went through the campaigns in Russia and Saxony, and in 1814 was incorporated with the 4th Regiment of the Line. Vélites drawn from the Fusiliers-Grenadiers were also attached to the service of the Prince Borghese at Turin, and of Prince Eugène at Milan.
The Vélites were trained first at Saint Germain-en-Laye, then at Écouen and at Fontainebleau. Bourgogne attended the writing, arithmetic, drawing, and gymnastic classes which were meant to complete the military education of these future officers; for, after a few years, the more efficient of the Vélites were promoted to the rank of Sub-Lieutenant.
After a few months, Bourgogne and his comrades were among the troops required for the campaign of 1806 in Poland, where Bourgogne became corporal. Two years later he took part in the Battle of Essling, where he was twice wounded.* From 1809 to 1811 he fought in Austria, Spain, and Portugal. In 1812 he was at Wilna, where the Emperor re-assembled his Guard before marching against the Russians. Bourgogne was now sergeant. Already he had travelled a great deal. He had seen something of most countries, and wherever he had been he had taken note of what he saw.
* He was wounded in the neck and leg; the ball entered the right thigh, and could never be extracted. Towards the end of his life it had worked down to about twelve inches above the foot.
How immense would be the value to the intimate history of the army under the First Empire, had he but left behind really complete memoirs, as foreshadowed in one passage of his book! The remarkable fragment or portion now issued raises a great expectation of the completion.
M. de Ségur's account of the Russian campaign needs no eulogy. In one respect it is lacking. It has not, and could not have, the personal accent of the experience that has been lived. M. de Ségur was on the staff, and had not to endure the sufferings of the private soldiers and the company officers – the sufferings which we now seem to know in their minutest details. They form the immense interest of Bourgogne’s memoirs – for he was not only a keen observer – he was a man who could see and put what he saw in a telling way; he ranks with the Captain Coignet revived for us by Lorédan Larchey. His notes are classics in their kind, and have set the example of a new type of military memoirs, that of the simple and obscure, coming from the people and representing them in the person of ordinary man. An accurate rendering of their impressions is likely to be valuable and interesting.
There is no need for us to insist on the dramatic worth of the pictures Bourgogne has drawn. We need only mention the orgie in the church at Smolensk, strewn with dead, the unfortunate men stumbling over the snow-covered heaps to reach the sanctuary, guided by music they believed to be from heaven, actually produced by drunken men at the organ; the organ itself half burnt, on the point of crashing down into the nave below. All this is unforgettable.
These Memoirs are equally valuable for their psychological study of the soldier depressed by a succession of reverses. The army of 1870 will read their own miseries again. Here, too, is the drama of hunger. Where shall we find a scene to compare with that of the garrison of Wilna flying at the sight of the spectre army, ready to devour everything before it? Moreover, we cannot help seeing that Bourgogne was a kind-hearted man; his bursts of egoism are contrary to his real nature, and are followed instantly by remorse. He helped his comrades to the utmost, and risked a great deal so that a prisoner whose father had aroused his sympathy might escape. He was deeply influenced by the horrors he witnessed. He saw men stripped and robbed before the breath was out of their bodies; he saw Croats pull corpses out of the flames and devour them; he saw wounded men left by the roadside for want of means of transport, begging for help with outstretched hands, and dragging themselves across snow reddened by their blood, while those who passed by looked on silently, wondering how soon their turn might come. Bourgogne himself fell into a ditch covered with ice near the Niémen, and begged for help in vain from the men who passed. One old Grenadier came up to him. ‘I have not got any,’ he said, raising two stumps to show that he had no helping hands to offer. Near the towns, where the troops thought their sufferings would come to an end, the return of hope made them more pitiful. Their tongues were loosed, they inquired for their comrades, they carried the sick on their muskets. Bourgogne saw soldiers carry their wounded officers on their shoulders for miles. Nor must we forgot the Hessians, who stood all night round their young Prince in twenty-eight* degrees of frost, as a fence protects a young plant. However, the effects of fatigue, fever, frost-bite, and badly-healed wounds, the undermining of his constitution by an attempted poisoning, were more than enough to make our sergeant drop behind and lose his regiment, as had happened to so many others.
* About 14º below zero, Fahrenheit.
He advanced, therefore, slowly and painfully, quite alone, often sinking in the snow up to his shoulders, thinking himself lucky if he escaped the Cossacks, and finding hiding-places in the woods; finally he recognised the road his column had taken by the corpses strewn along the way.
On a pitch-dark night he reached the scene of a battle, and in stumbling over heaped-up bodies, found one which feebly cried ‘Help!’ He searched and found an old friend, Grenadier Picart, a shrewd type of old soldier, and a thoroughly good fellow, whose happy nature carried him through everything.
Hearing, however, from a Russian officer that the Emperor and his Guard had all been made prisoners, Picart was suddenly seized with a mad fit, presented arms, and shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ as if he were being reviewed.
This fact is most noteworthy, that the soldier, in spite of all his sufferings, never accused the sole cause of his misfortunes. He remained loyal and devoted, soul and body, convinced that Napoleon would know how to save the army and take his revenge. It was the soldiers’ religion. ‘Picart, like all the Emperor’s old soldiers, thought that as soon as they were with him, everything would be well, all would succeed; that, in fact, nothing was impossible.’ Up to a certain point, Bourgogne shared this view. And yet, when they returned to France, his regiment was reduced to twenty-six men!
Their god always moved them deeply. When Picart saw him at the crossing of the Bérézina, ‘wrapped in a great fur-lined cloak, a purple velvet cap on his head, and a stick in his hand,’ he wept, saying, ‘Look at our Emperor on foot! So great as he is, so proud as we always were of him!’
At last, in March, 1813, Bourgogne was once more in his own country, and promoted (receiving the epaulette of a Sub-Lieutenant of the 145th of the Line). He then set off again for Prussia. He was wounded at the Battle of Dessau (October 12th, 1813), and made prisoner.
His leisure hours of captivity were spent in recalling his recent experiences and making notes. These, and the letters written to his mother, served later to form the Memoirs. Also he talked of the past with old comrades, a list of whom he has given, and who have added their testimony to his.
On the first return of the Bourbons,* he had sent in his resignation on the pretext of helping his parents to support their numerous family. He married soon afterwards.
* ‘As the Emperor is no longer in France,’ he said himself in a note in his Memoirs, ‘I shall throw up my commission.’
Family life has its trials also. Bourgogne lost his wife, who left him with two daughters. He married again,* and had two more children.
* Bourgogne married at Condé on August 31st, 1814, Thérèse Fortunée Demarez. After her death, in 1822, he married Philippine Godart, a native of Tournai.
He had settled down to his father’s business, a draper’s; but he soon left the shop, and threw himself into an industrial enterprise, where he lost most of his money. His simple habits, and his naturally cheerful nature, helped him through his misfortunes, which did not, however, prevent his educating his daughters well, He was devoted to them, and inspired them with his own love of art; one gave herself up to painting, the other to music. He possessed a good voice, and often sang, according to old custom, after the family meals. His collection of pictures, curiosities, and souvenirs of his campaigns brought many visitors to his house.
When he went to Paris he never neglected to pay a visit to his old comrades at the Invalides. Many also in his native town met every day at the café, and talked of old times. On the anniversary of the entrance of the French into Moscow they had a dinner, and all drank in turn from a cup brought from the Kremlin: these old soldiers of the Guard made a religion of the past.
When the days of 1830 brought the return of the tricolour,* Bourgogne thought of returning to the service. His family had some influence at Condé, where his brother was a doctor.**
* ‘In 1830,’ he said in the note already quoted, ‘I shall return to the service when the tricolour reappears.’
** Our sergeant had three brothers and a sister, of whom he was the
eldest: François, Professor of Mathematics at the College of Condé
;Firmin, died young; Florence, married to a brewer; Louis Florent, Doctor
of Medicine of the Faculty of Paris, died in 1870.
Marie Françoise Monnier, their mother, was born at Condé
in 1764.
M. de Vatimesnil, previously Minister of Louis XVIII. and Charles X., and then Deputy for Valenciennes, did all he could to support the old soldier of nine campaigns and three wounds, and, moreover, neglected by the fallen Government. He therefore proposed, as legitimate compensation, his nomination to the post of Major de Place, now vacant at Condé. The letter to Marshal Soult, then Minister of War, was countersigned by the two other Deputies of the Nord, Brigode and Morel. As M. de Vatimesnil received no answer, he wrote again a fortnight afterwards.
‘This nomination,’ he wrote, ‘would not only be an excellent one from a military point of view, but also from a political one. The Château of the Hermitage, belonging to M. le Duc de Croy, is one league from Condé, and is a meeting-place for malcontents. I do not wish for a moment to suggest that they have evil intentions, but prudence demands that a fortified place situated near the Château, and on the extreme frontier, should be confided to perfectly trustworthy officers. I can answer for the energy of M. Bourgogne.’
Failing the post, he asked for the Cross of the Legion of Honour for his protégé. But Bourgogne was entirely forgotten at the offices of the Ministry, and all traces of his services seemed to have disappeared. M. de Vatimesnil was now obliged to compile a set of papers, which he sent in on September 24th. Two months afterwards, on November 10th, the former Vélite was at last appointed Lieutenant-Adjutant de Place, but at Brest instead of Condé! That was far off indeed; but, at the same time, it was one rung up the ladder, and on March 21st, 1831, he received the Cross of the Legion of Honour. New efforts were now made to obtain the post of Adjutant de Place at Valenciennes, and his wish was at last fulfilled on July 25th, 1832. They remember at Valenciennes to this day the services he performed there, especially during the troubles of 1848. He retired on a pension of twelve hundred francs in 1853.*
* We found M. de Vatimesnil’s letters in the military portfolio of Bourgogne, in the War Archives.
He died, an octogenarian, on April 25th, 1867, two years after the famous Coignet, who lived to be ninety years old. The terrible hardships they had gone through had not the effect of shortening their lives. But a man had to be exceptionally strong to survive them. Unhappily his last days were clouded by physical suffering, but neither his good temper nor the philosophy of his character were spoiled by it. Mme. Bussière, one of his nieces, came after the death of his second wife to take care of him, and, by her devoted care, to give him all the relief possible.
Two portraits of our hero are given here. [The portraits are not included in this electronic text.] The first is the facsimile of a drawing signed Alphonse Chigot. It is Bourgogne in profile, dressed in ordinary clothes, at the time of his leaving the service; the other, a lithograph, shows Bourgogne at the age of forty-five, with the stern official air and hard glance of an Adjutant-in-charge, a living personification of command. What we know, however, of his natural kindness shows us the truth of the poet’s precept:
‘Garde-toi, taut que to vivras,
De juger les gens sur la mine!’
Let us add that in his youth he was called a handsome soldier; his height and military carriage were impressive.* We have made no alteration in the text other than to correct mistakes of spelling and the suppression of unnecessary words. Less scruple was shown in a paper – now out of print (L’Écho de la Frontière) – which in 1857 published a part of the Memoirs of Bourgogne, and corrected them so effectually that all the original flavour had vanished.
* We give here a list, copied from the Memoirs, of the important battles in which Bourgogne took part: Jena, Pultusk, Eylau, Eilsberg, Friedland, Essling, Wagram, Somo-Sierra, Benévent, Smolensk, the Moskowa, Krasnoë, the Bérézina, Lutzen, and Bautzen. ‘I may add,’ he said, ‘more than twenty small encounters and other skirmishes.’
The collection of L’Écho de la Frontière is very rare. The only copy I know of is in the library at Valenciennes. The Bourgogne paper was torn away from it, and we have only found two copies, one in the National Library, the other in the library of M. le Baron Olivier de Watteville. These only contain part of the text published by the paper, and are included in the first half of the present volume. We have therefore treated these Memoirs as having the value of an unfinished work up to their publication in 1896 in the Nouvelle Revue Rétrospective.*
* Bourgogne’s Memoirs appeared for the first time in extenso in our Nouvelle Revue Rétrospective, which for the last fourteen years has been devoted to the publication of documents on our national history.
We must acknowledge with gratitude our indebtedness to M. Maurice Hénault, keeper of the records at Valenciennes, for having communicated to us the original manuscript, now preserved in the town library. He did far more, by copying with his own hand the 616 pages in folio of the manuscript, thus guaranteeing the accuracy of the copy.
We also express our thanks to M. Auguste Molinier, whose original idea it was to offer the publication of the manuscript to the Nouvelle Revue Rétrospeetive, and to M. Ed. Martel, who made inquiries as to the Bourgogne family at Valenciennes and Condé. We must also mention our hero’s nephews, M. le Docteur Bourgogne and M. Amadée Bcurgogne, M. Loriaux – his former landlord – and M. Paul Marmottan, who have given us valuable assistance in our work.
PAUL COTTIN.
December 13th, 1896.