Daily Life During the French Revolution (41 page)

Slowly, a better system was developed in which lighter,
faster, and more comfortable carriages were kept closer to the fighting, with
first-aid kits attached. On the basis of his observations, Larrey established
new surgical guidelines. Immediate amputation was indicated if:

a.     The limb
was shattered or the joints smashed.

b.     Small
bones, joints, and nerves were all broken up.

c.     There
was too much muscle tissue damage or major arteries were missing, even if the
bone or joint was sound.

He stopped the use of liniments and ointments, ordered that
wounds be washed only with water, and required that, if amputation was
required, the stump was to be dressed with new adhesive bandages so that the
wound could drain.

Larrey’s surgical skills became so efficient that he was
able to sever a leg in one minute, an arm in 17 seconds. He gave much of the
credit for saving lives to his ambulances, which allowed wounds to be dressed
first on the battlefield and the wounded to be quickly evacuated afterwards.

Those who had been wounded in the war had first claim on
the resources of the state. Further, pensions for invalid veterans were
increased, with the lowest-ranked being given the same as an officer. Needy
families of military men were promised more help, and war widows were promised
increased pensions and a less cumbersome way to apply for them, under the terms
of a law passed June 1, 1794. The promises to the wounded veterans and their
families sounded impressive, but everything was massively underfunded and months
in arrears. In addition, resistance to pensions for those wounded in war and
for war widows came from all quarters. All funding was finally suspended, a
bitter shock to many of the sufferers.

AVOIDANCE OF DRAFT, AND DESERTIONS

Conscription first became mandatory on February 14, 1793,
and was extended in August by the mass call-up. By 1794, the republic
theoretically had more than a million men under arms—an exceptional number for
the times. Conscription was not popular in France, and placards and graffiti
immediately appeared everywhere crying out against it. In the west, the
compulsory enrollment helped provoke massive uprisings, especially in the
countryside. The 1790s were difficult for the country’s lower-class youth.
While politicians dreamed of liberating Europe from oppressive monarchies,
their lofty ambitions were not shared by those who were called upon to do the
fighting. The years of heavy call-up for the army were the spring of 1793 and
1795 (and, later, 1808 and 1810), and in many village communities where the
inhabitants were deeply attached to the soil, there was no tradition of
military service. Sowing seeds and harvesting the crop were more important than
marching across Europe to fight for abstract concepts like freedom and liberty.
For peasant families, anywhere away from their immediate environment was
generally considered foreign, a place where things were strange and of little
consequence for their own daily lives. The local community was often all the
peasants knew or wanted to know, and their resistance to recruitment took a
variety of forms.

Many conscripts did not appear at the recruiting stations.
A useful subterfuge was for an eligible son to use the documents of a younger
dead brother to conceal his age or even for parents to send a younger child in
place of an older brother, knowing he would be turned down for failing to
measure up to the height requirement.

Since only bachelors were expected to serve, marriage was
one way out of military service, and records show that the stratagem of a
convenient marriage was often used. There was a large increase in marriages
hastily contracted during times of call-up. While the government could do
nothing about it, officials were probably not surprised when they found that a
potential conscript of 20 had married a woman of 74. The revolutionary laws
permitted divorce. Not until 1808 did a new law on marriage stipulate that a
recruit had to prove at least three months of marriage before he could be
considered ineligible for military service. Marriage certificates were often
falsified, however. There were other methods of avoiding the draft; some men
forged birth certificates to appear younger, sons mysteriously “passed away,”
and young men chopped or shot off trigger fingers. Town representatives from
the mayor down in many places helped falsify medical documents for their local
men and sometimes even hid them in their houses. If the family of a dissenter
had the money, a medical doctor might prescribe a concoction hat would produce
high fever and difficulty in breathing for a short period of time so that the
recruit would be rejected as unfit for military duty.

When looking for deserters in the countryside, the police
or soldiers often ran into a wall of silence as the people of the village
protected their sons and even resorted to violence to do so. Desertion was
rampant. In March 1795, the country had 1.1 million men enrolled in the army,
but probably not more than half that number were actually under arms as they
were supposed to be. Few in rural France considered it a crime to desert or to
find some other way out of military service. While pamphlets extolled the
virtues of the army, with the benefits of pay and regular food, and the chance
to participate in the glorious fight to preserve liberty and the revolution
while freeing others still under the yoke of despotism, these claims made
little impact on young rural men. There was always someone in the village or a
stranger passing through who had been to war and knew what the government
propaganda failed to say. Booty, adventure, and glory were set against the
realities of war—intestines hanging out from a stomach ripped open by an enemy
bayonet, blindness and burns suffered in an explosion, shattered bones from
musket shot; the real possibility of lying wounded on a battlefield for days
before the end finally came, loss of a leg, an arm, or both to gangrene, and
amputation that could be expected even from lesser wounds. Where was the glory
here?

Desertion in the 1790s did not always mean a life on the
run; often young men simply returned to their villages, where friends and
neighbors would welcome the runaway and protect him. Officials of small
localities felt more loyalty to the deserter than they did to the government in
Paris. Often local mayors failed to submit lists of conscripts to the
government as they were legally required to do. Even larger towns in the
Gironde failed to comply with the law. Male villagers and relatives of
deserters were known to attack soldiers or police who came to arrest the
runaway.

Reacting to this, the government billeted soldiers in the
family home of a deserter, causing a burden on the family and inhabitants until
the man gave himself up. The soldiers, generally drunk, noisy, and prone to harassing
the women, also sometimes made the villagers demand that the deserter give
himself up. In the area of the Tarn, however, locals refused to feed the
soldiers, motivating the military to withdraw rather than face the prospect of
sending in food for their men. On some occasions, entire households left their
cottages, joining their sons or brothers in the hills, rather than submit to
what they considered to be arbitrary injustice.

In principle, desertion could be punished by death after
1793, but this was not put into practice. The death penalty was reserved for
those who deserted to the enemy and fought against France.

LETTERS FROM SOLDIERS

Soldiers’ memoirs and letters home cast a little more light
on what life was like in the army. Sergeant Friscasse, son of a gardener who
had already enlisted, signed up at age 19 on August 24, 1792, in the first regiment
of the Haute-Marne. He seems to have spent much of his time in arms drill and
marching. Not until September 12, 1793, did he see his first action while
engaged in the defense of Mauburg. French troops defending the city suffered
hardship from hunger, since the enemy had taken or destroyed all the grain.
There were no provisions in the town, and the surrounding countryside was
devoid of food sources. The water, drawn from ditches close to the latrines,
was foul, and many suffered from typhoid fever. Wine was scarce, and life was
extremely tedious. Later, his regiment moved on to winter quarters in other
towns, always close to the enemy. Marching and boredom seem to have been an
integral part of a soldier’s life, interspersed with physical contact with the
enemy. Sergeant Friscasse, however, occupied some of his time writing
descriptions of the places he was stationed.

Another young man, Xavier Vernère, started out with a
miserable life that began to improve when, at age 14, he walked right across
France to Rochefort, where an uncle helped him enlist in the naval cadets.
Having come down with a fever, however, he was unable to sail to India with the
rest of the cadets of his school, and the navy now did not want him. In 1790,
he made his way to Tours to another uncle, a sergeant-major in the Anjou
regiment. Here he learned a little about life in the army. He followed the
regiment to St. Malo and eventually was able to join. His uncle was promoted to
second lieutenant, and Xavier, now 16, was to serve under him.

War had been declared, and the supplemented Anjou regiment
was ordered to join the army in the north. On July 15, 1792, the division was
camped on the plain of St. Denis, near Paris. The soldiers were forbidden to
enter the city, but, climbing up the hill of Montmartre, Xavier and his
companions could see the entire city. The temptation was too great. They
crossed the barrier and entered Paris. The experience was exhilarating: the
boulevards, the Place Louis XV, the Seine and its bridges, the Legislative
Assembly, and especially the Palais Royal were astonishing sights for country
boys.

Orders were now changed, and the division left St. Denis, not
for the north but instead to join the army of the Rhine, going via Nancy and
Lunéville. Here Xavier met a young lady at the house where he was lodging, and
they spent many hours together talking in the garden. The following morning, at
sunup, the troops were buckling on their packs, preparing to leave for the next
stage of their march, when the young woman came to wish Xavier goodbye. They
slipped off together to hide in a doorway, Xavier ignoring the demands of the
army. Their passionate embraces were interrupted by an officer, who ordered the
young man to join his troop. In spite of looking longingly back at the town
where he had left behind his new love, Xavier soon found the realities of war
occupying his thoughts as the troop reached Haguenau. Carts transporting the
wounded to the rear passed regularly, the cracks between the floor planks
dripping blood onto the road. The lines were reached, but no attack from either
side was in the offing, and the French troops spent the winter encamped near
Rudesheim and Bingen, on the Rhine. Xavier was greatly delighted when he was
promoted to quartermaster-sergeant and confessed that no Marshal of France

ever
received his bâton with greater pride than I felt when I put the silver galoons
on my sleeve. Ideas above my station fired my mind and I fatuously calculated
that, at seventeen and a half, I had a rank which raised me well above
nine-tenths of the entire army.

Xavier survived and eventually became a Colonel of the
Empire under Napoleon.

Born in 1770 at Nancy to well-off farmers, Gabriel Noël
received a good education. Having volunteered for the army, he was sent to the
town of Sierck, in Germany. He found it a tiresome, wretched hole and spent his
time studying German and reading. From there the troop moved on to another
German-speaking village in Lorraine that was worse. He noted that they had two
beds for five men and wrote, “Fate has decided that I should be in the one
containing three persons. Our beds are made of straw with a sheet spread over
it.” On top of the sheet was a feather quilt. But, he adds, “what makes it even
less inviting is that every detachment in France seems to have used our
sheets.” He mentioned that the bugs were rampant, that he slept in his clothes
(apart from his overcoat), and that he had difficulty communicating with the
Germans.

Another volunteer, Etienne Gaury, quartered at Fort Vauban
during the early months of 1793, used to march along the bank of the Rhine with
the band playing in view of the enemy. He comments that they did not shoot at
them; had it been the other way around, the French would certainly have done
so. Life for Etienne was not too unpleasant except for two things: high prices
and the stupidity of the inhabitants, whom he found brutish and coarse. Nor did
Etienne like the food. Pork, vegetables, and potatoes were in abundance, but,
he complained that the staples of the French soldier, wine and bread, were too
expensive.

Other letters from soldiers record this common complaint.
They detested the beer drunk by the locals and longed for a good bottle of wine
or brandy from home.

Such was the case also in the south. On February 4, 1795,
Captain Gabriel Auvrey, stationed at Mauberge, received a letter from his two
brothers who were at Fort l’Aiguille, near Toulon, complaining that everything
was too costly: 20 sous for a bottle of wine that five months before had cost
5, and a loaf of bread cost 3 livres. They reported that cloth also was too
expensive for them to buy. “To make a pair of trousers and a waistcoat of Nankeen
or Siamese calico you have to put down seventy-five livres.” As the war
continued, troops complained more and more of the shortage of food and rising
prices.