The wars which engulfed the Napoleonic
Age were monumental affairs involving the mobilization of millions of men from
across Europe. Such titanic struggles are often analyzed from the bird’s eye perspective
of the armchair general. But in this series, we shall descend to the ground level
to experience the history of the common soldier. From the process of conscription
to individual and unit level training, the chaos of battle, and beyond. This is the story
of a Soldier's Life in Napoleon’s Grande Armée. [SPONSOR PLUG] But before we throw ourselves into the midst of
battle, we will have to rewind the clock to see how soldiers came to find themselves in the ranks
of the army in the first place. To do so we will focus our first episode on the recruitment
and training of new soldiers. Let us begin. From the formation of the First Coalition in 1792
to Napoleon’s final downfall at Waterloo in 1815, France fought most of Europe for
the better part of two decades, from the hills of Portugal to the depths of
Russia and colonial theaters across the seas. Satisfying the wars’ vast appetite for manpower
became the central issue for Napoleon’s empire, and failure to resolve it
led to its ultimate collapse. As such we will now discuss the process by
which soldiers were recruited. Since the storming of the Bastille, the various
revolutionary governments had relied largely on volunteers to fill its ranks.
However, following a string of defeats, the French Royal Army moved to institute a series
of emergency mass conscriptions, culminating in the Levée en masse of 1793. Starting with a
quota for the nation to raise 300,000 soldiers, it was a bold move meant to pull France from the
brink of defeat. The decree read as follows: quote "From this moment until such time as its
enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic, all Frenchmen are in
permanent requisition for the services of the armies. The young men shall fight; the married
men shall forge arms and transport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothes and shall
serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn old linen into lint; the old men shall betake
themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach
hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic." This revolutionary spirit and the swelling
nationalism of the common people had now unlocked a vast pool of manpower unrivaled by
many of its contemporaries. Over the course of the Revolutionary Wars, perhaps
a million men fought for France, allowing it to not only defend itself
but take the offensive against a growing Coalition of hostile neighbors. But even
these vast forces dwindled in time. Thus, it was necessary to establish a more
permanent system to maintain French armies. This was done in 1798, when a military commission
passed the Jourdan Law which established the legal basis of recruitment. Once more it highlighted the
war footing of the nation with article 1 stating that quote: “Every Frenchman is a soldier
and must defend the country.” Shortly after, article 3 lays out the broad terms of the
reform: quote “Outside of the case of danger to the country, the army is formed from voluntary
enrollment and by way of military conscription." We will now take a look at both volunteer and
conscripted service, beginning with the former. According to the law, men aged 18 to 30 could
enlist voluntarily for a term of four years in peacetime. Some exceptions were made
for younger volunteers. For instance, the children of soldiers could enlist at the
age of 16. In 1806 Napoleon extended this exception to civilian 16-year-olds
who had their parents’ permission. According to the law, all such
volunteers would need to present a certificate of good conduct signed by
the mayor of their municipality and the justice of the peace. Their enrollment
would then be registered in a town hall where records would be taken of the citizen’s
identity, residence, and physical description. As an incentive for such volunteers
to come forward, they were paid more than conscripts with this bonus gradually
increasing the longer they served. However, despite such incentives and
the lofty rhetoric of the law, volunteers were not enough to meet the
manpower needs of the French Army which, during the Napoleonic Wars, consisted mostly of
conscripts. Let us now turn to this practice. Officially, the law subjected men aged 20 to
25 to conscription, dividing them into five age classes. Local authorities were ordered to
maintain lists of all such men in their district. Information included the names, professions,
and residences of all men of suitable age. When the call from up high came for conscription,
it would involve a quota of men which must be raised from the various territorial regions
known as Cantons. Each cantonal authority would then consult its list of eligible
men and select conscripts by lottery. Each man would have a number randomly drawn,
ranging from 1 to the total number of eligible candidates. Those whose number was below or
equal to the required quota were selected. Next, they would face a council to
determine their fitness to serve. This recruitment council was headed by the
department prefect. Alongside him was the senior military officer of the department and a
major from the Ministry of War. A captain from one of the regiments slated to receive the new
draft advised the council but could not vote. This council screened men based on
various criteria. Generally speaking, conscripts had to be in good health and
stand at least 1.488 meters tall. A host of other exemptions existed, including men
whose brothers had already been killed, single fathers with children to care for, and men
already registered for conscription into the navy. Men lacking sight in the right eye, front
teeth necessary to tear open paper cartridges, or the right thumb or index finger
were exempt from service. Loss of a whole left hand or other limb also
disqualified potential conscripts. As a result, self-mutilation was a common means
of draft evasion. Should they be discovered, these men would be punished with 5
years of hard labor. Those who had come by their infirmities honestly,
or at least remained undetected, had to pay a 50 franc indemnity, the rough
equivalent of five months wages for a soldier. However another method of recruitment occurred
in the form of substitution whereby a conscript might hire another to take his place. While
initially a somewhat informal practice, this actually became legalized in 1800. However not
just anyone could become a substitute. They had to be in good health, stand at least 1.651 meters
tall, and not themselves be a potential conscript. As the wars of the Empire
proved increasingly deadly, the demand for substitutional service
skyrocketed. Not only would draft dodging conscripts have to pay the 100 francs for their
substitute’s uniform but they would also pay them a sign-on fee many times a soldier’s
annual wage. Sadly this often meant that it was the poorest and most desperate who
took the place in Napoleon’s front lines. Yet even the system put in place by the
Jourdan Law could not keep up with the meatgrinder of the Empire’s Wars. As such
the French Government increasingly began to stretch the age limits of conscription
beyond the initial 20-to-25-year range while also forbidding men from leaving the ranks
regardless of how long they had already served. In this way, roughly one and a half million
men were mobilized to fight for an Empire which ultimately came to gobble up much of
Europe and directly rule over 44 million people. The vast majority of these troops who
fought under the eagles did so in the infantry, and so it shall be they whom we focus on as
we explore the life of a Napoleonic soldier. We can begin with a soldier who has just
passed the inspection of the conscription council. He will now be assigned
a date to gather in the department capital and depart for their assigned
regimental depots under armed escort. As can be imagined, these departures
were emotional scenes. Philippe Gille, a conscript of 1808, recounts the
following in his memoirs: quote “I left Paris by the Saint Martin Gate.
Arriving at Bourget [Boor-jeh], we had lunch, and as we left this village, I asked my brother
and those of my friends who accompanied me not to go any further. This child remained as
if petrified in the middle of the road, his two arms outstretched towards me, and though
I was already very far away, he had not changed his stance; However, when I lost sight of him,
tears finally came, and after having given this last tribute to tenderness I caught up with my
traveling companions and continued on my way.” For many, such an experience was too much to bear, and desertion was common. This was often the
case among peasant farmer families who relied on young men to work the land. Desertion
was especially rife in southern France, which was generally poorer and more skeptical of
the Revolution and Empire than the North and East. As the wars increasingly turned against France,
the Empire relied on harsher measures to combat draft evasion and desertion. Columns
of gendarmes prowled the country, searching for deserters. One of their measures
was to quarter soldiers in the deserter’s home, preventing them from returning and putting
further financial pressure on their families. But for all recruits who did not dodge service,
their next stop towards the front was an assigned mustering point. Often this would have
been an army depot. Here the men would join their officers and the rest of their
unit. This union would have been formalized when conscripts took the oath of soldiers
in the French army which went as follows: quote: "I swear obedience to the Constitution
of the Empire and fidelity to the Emperor.” With this pronouncement, they would then be
entered into their regiment’s administrative registers. Thus began life in Napoleon’s army. As
soldiers, they would now receive their equipment, including weapons and uniforms. In emergency
situations, these green troops would be rushed into battle. Ideally however they would have
several weeks or months at the depot before being deployed. This precious time would have
been dedicated to training. We shall cover it now. Following Napoleon’s 1808 decree
reorganizing the French infantry, the depot was organized as a battalion of
four companies with a small headquarters, led by a major. The four companies had different
functions. The fourth saw to the initial equipment and training of the new conscripts, the first
and third would march the conscripts to and convalescents back from the war battalions, and
the second would see to garrison duties in France. Training in the depot was organized into
a series of ‘schools’. At the most basic level was the ‘school of the soldier’, in
which the conscript learned from a more experienced soldier how to stand, how to
march, how to hold his weapon, and so on. Next came the ‘school of the platoon’, which
taught the conscripts how to move and fight as part of a unit. Formation drill was critical to
a soldier’s survival on the battlefields of the empire. Troops caught out of formation -or in
the wrong formation, for facing the wrong way- were vulnerable to enemies massed in good order,
particularly cavalry. The school of the platoon taught soldiers how to march in formation,
how to file march to one side or the other, how to change direction by wheeling, how
to move from line to column and vice versa. The school of the platoon also taught
giving fire by command as a whole platoon and fire by two ranks, in which the
first two ranks fired at will and the third rank passed loaded muskets forward to the
second, receiving empty muskets to reload. French tactics of the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars prized aimed musket fire, so when stocks of powder and shot allowed, the
depots incorporated target practice into the conscripts’ training regimen. This often took the
form of shooting competitions, in which the best shots could win cash prizes. Target practice began
at nearly 100 meters and was repeated at 200 and 300 meters. Soldiers would then comb the fields
for the spent balls so they could be remolded. Once they had been sufficiently trained, or
the need at the front became sufficiently dire, the depot companies of different regiments
would assemble into march battalions to depart for the war battalions to which they were
assigned. At the end of their daily marches, the training continued as they honed their
drill in the ‘school of the battalion’; the battalion was the main tactical
unit during the Napoleonic Wars, so these were important maneuvers; changing
front, forming battalion lines, squares, columns of divisions, and transitioning from
different formations to each other were some of the most important. This was the beginning of a
long trek across Europe to the embattled frontiers of the Empire. Alas it was a trek many would not
survive, and from which even fewer ever returned. Join us in our next episode as we cover life
in Napoleon’s army and be sure to check out the amazing work of the 21st who’ve done
a fantastic job bringing the past to life. Consider becoming a member of the channel
or our Patreon to catch script previews, behind the scenes content, and polls. A
big thanks to the members for supporting the channel as well as the researchers,
writers, and artists for making this episode possible. We couldn't have done
it without this team and this community. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure
to like and subscribe for more content and check out these other related
videos. See you in the next one.
