While Napoleon's soldiers plundered and desecrated Moscow in 1812, Russian troops came to Paris in 1814 in peace and won the sympathy of the townspeople. The French were especially fond of the Cossacks - “giants from the Don”. So much so that from that time on, any Russian, from a soldier to a general, was called by the Parisians nothing more than "Cossack" …
Russian Cossacks proved to the French that they are "a noble and cibulized army"
Rumors that the Russians had come to get even for the devastated Moscow quickly spread throughout the French capital. After all, only in the battle of Paris, 6 thousand of our soldiers fell. Quite enough for revenge. But nothing of the kind happened. If Napoleon could not wait for the keys or even a modest delegation from the Muscovites, then Alexander I rode into Paris on a white horse, showered with flowers. Having conquered the Parisians with a knightly gesture, he achieved from the French that the "genius" Corsican did not receive from the Russians either cannons or grapeshot …
Victory by generosity
The Parisians were expecting "Scythian barbarians", but saw a brilliant European army. “Thousands of women waved their headscarves” and drowned out with their exclamations “military music and the drums themselves,” as Nikolai Bestuzhev wrote. The Parisian children gazed at the exotic stripes and hats of the Cossacks, and they took the boys in their arms and put them on horses in front of them. So we got to the city center …
As a child, Alexander told his grandmother Catherine II that from the history lessons he remembered most of all how King Henry IV, having laid siege to the capital of France in the 16th century, sent bread to the starving townspeople. In 1814, our tsar himself got a chance to show generosity in defeated Paris. “I love the French. I recognize only one enemy among them - Napoleon,”said Alexander and took the city under his protection.
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He really toughly suppressed looting and looting. That is why the Cossacks were settled not in barracks and private houses, but right in the center of Paris. Donets set up bivouacs on the Champs Elysees, Montmartre and the Champ de Mars. Crowds of rotozeans stared as "steppe giants" slept with saddles under their heads, fanning samovars, making fires on the boulevards, frying meat. In the mornings, they bathed their horses in the Seine, and they themselves dived into the April water, some in their underwear and some naked, as if they had not left their native Don. At night, dashing Cossack dances attracted "moths". On this occasion, the Don chieftain, General Platov, reminded the soldiers that, they say, we are "the sworn Cossacks of the Russian emperor, a noble and tsibulized army," and ordered "not to offend their madams and mamzel, unless by mutual agreement."
The "madams" had no complaints, but the French complained about the parquet floors in houses and carps caught for fish soup from the ponds of Fontainebleau that were hacked for the firebox of field kitchens. Similarly, the “expropriation” of peasant goods, which the Cossacks traded on the Novy Most, provoked fights when the victims tried to return their own. But, unlike the Moscow nightmares, the appearance of the buildings was not damaged, the cathedrals were not desecrated, not a single item of sacred utensils was lost during the two months of the Russians' stay in Paris. Alexander I restored the lawns of Montmartre, spoiled by bonfires, and Napoleon's "war trophies", looted in the countries he conquered, remained in the museums of Paris. In the Louvre, no one touched anything, and the Cossacks only baptized themselves at the sight of nudity on museum canvases.
In a word, the Parisian "damage" is not comparable with the Moscow disasters - stables and smelting forges for melting gold and silver utensils in churches, for example. Even the battered General Alexander Benckendorff “was seized with horror” entering the Kremlin's Assumption Cathedral after Napoleon’s “unbridled soldiers” left Moscow: “The relics of the saints were mutilated, their tombs were filled with filth; the decorations from the tombs were torn off."
Alexander, on Orthodox Easter on April 10 (according to the old style), 1814, erected an altar in Paris, and the Place de la Concorde resounded with harmonious Russian singing. The tsar wrote to St. Petersburg, not without irony, how "a numerous phalanx of French generals crowded around the Russian cross and pushed each other in order to be able to venerate it as soon as possible"! The moral victory of the "Scythians" over Europe was complete.
How to beat aristocrats
In Paris, Alexander I ordered that the troops be given a threefold salary. The servicemen, including the Cossacks, played cards and roulette in the Palais Royal and, of course, ran into debt. These French loans - 1.5 million rubles (135 million rubles today!) - were paid out of his pocket by the hero of Borodino, Count Mikhail Vorontsov. For this he sold the estate Krugloye, inherited from his own aunt, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova. Legend has it that most of the debts were champagne bills …
Art officer Radozhitsky recalled how the townsfolk were delighted when they saw "handsome officers, dandies, not inferior both in dexterity and flexibility of language and degree of education to the first Parisian dandies." But the Cossacks, not even mastering the "mixture of French and Nizhny Novgorod," on all counts "outdone" the aristocrats. After all, it was their appearance that the French began to imitate, growing beards and attaching knives to wide belts. Fashion has spread to the Cossack steppe horses.
And since there were not enough of them for everyone, the swindlers weaved dyed tow into the tails of ordinary horses (after all, the Cossacks did not cut their tails for their stallions and mares) and sold “fakes” to simpletons at exorbitant prices. Cossack words "whip", "steppe", "man", "squatting", "samovar" have become firmly established in French speech. For comparison: after the Napoleonic invasion, we still have expressions of a completely different kind: "ball skier" (from cher ami - "dear friend") and "trash" (from chevalier - "knight", "horseman"). And why is there just one sign at the door of the La Mere Catherine brasserie in Montmartre? The one that reads: "Here on March 30, 1814, the Cossacks gave life to their famous" fast "which became the most worthy progenitor of all our bistros." The inscription appeared 70 years after the departure of the Cossacks from Paris. For a long time France remembered the bearded horsemen!
Don glory spread throughout Europe, reaching the shores of England. The Cossack Ataman General Platov at the University of Oxford was awarded the title of Honorary Doctor of Law, and the British named their new ship in his honor. Poet Byron was the first to proclaim “I am a Cossack” in London, after him other British and even … French began to call themselves that! And it was like this …
From Napoleon to Orenburg
Not everyone knows that about 100 thousand captured Napoleonic soldiers (French, Germans, Poles, Italians) voluntarily became defectors, of whom 60 thousand took Russian citizenship. Some settled on the noble estates and taught the barchuk French. True, there were also funny things. For example, the son of the Smolensk landowner Yuri Arnold (later a famous Russian economist) in childhood, together with a French soldier, his "uncle" Grazhan, made fires, put up tents, shot and drummed. And when a Russian teenager entered the Moscow University Noble Boarding School, he shocked everyone at the very first French lesson. He briskly sprinkled expressions like "let's eat" or "crawling like a pregnant louse", really and not knowing about their obscene sound.
In 1815, former prisoners of war Antoine Berg, Charles Joseph Bouchey, Jean Pierre Binelon, Antoine Vikler, Edouard Langlois asked for Russian citizenship and entered the Cossack Orenburg army. Since 1825, the aristocrat Désiré d'Andeville taught at the Neplyuevsky military school. His son Victor Dandeville became a general from infantry and became famous in battles in Turkestan, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia and Bulgaria. In 1836, a chain of Cossack settlements grew from Orsk to Berezovskaya, where French Cossacks were resettled with their families to protect the borders of Russia. Here settled, for example, a former prisoner of war, already large by that time Ilya Kondratyevich Auz and a descendant of a Frenchman and a Cossack woman Ivan Ivanovich Zhandre. The latter rose to the rank of centurion.
By the end of the 19th century, no less than 200 villagers with French roots lived in those parts. On the Don, families with the surnames Zhandrovy (from Gendre) and Belova (from Binelon) were also not uncommon …
Napoleon said at one time: "Give me some Cossacks, and I will go with them all over Europe." But it happened exactly the opposite: his soldiers joined the Cossack army and defended their new homeland "from adversaries". But the dream of Alexander I to win with generosity came true: yesterday's enemies became friends. And the Russian Cossacks played an important role in this.
Magazine: Mysteries of History No. 17, Lyudmila Makarova