After the Russian campaign, fragments of Napoleon's once great army scattered across the vast expanses of Russia. Some of the soldiers returned home, but many wished to stay in a foreign country forever.
Where has the army gone?
In 1869, the retired French engineer Charles-Joseph Minard, with his characteristic meticulousness, did a unique job: he created a diagram in which he reflected the change in the number of Napoleonic troops during the Russian campaign.
According to the figures, out of 422 thousand Napoleonic soldiers who crossed the Neman, only 10 thousand returned back.
The French engineer did not take into account another 200 thousand people who joined Napoleon's army during the war. According to modern data, no more than 50 thousand people from the 600-thousandth Great Army in the opposite direction crossed the border of Russia. It is estimated that about 150 thousand people died in six months of fighting, but where are the other 400 thousand?
The summer of 1812 in Russia turned out to be extremely hot. Napoleonic soldiers languished from the scorching sun and dust: many died from heatstrokes and heart attacks. The situation was aggravated by intestinal infections, which, in conditions of unsanitary conditions, mercilessly mowed down the conquerors. Then came the time of cold showers, which were replaced by severe frosts …
The historian Vladlen Sirotkin estimates the number of captured Napoleonic soldiers (French, Germans, Poles, Italians) at 200 thousand people - almost all who survived in inhospitable Russia.
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Many of them were not destined to survive - hunger, epidemics, frosts, massacres. Nevertheless, about 100 thousand soldiers and officers remained in Russia two years later, of which about 60 thousand (most of them are French) - took Russian citizenship.
After the end of the war, King Louis XVIII of France asked Alexander I to somehow influence the compatriots who were stuck in Russia and force them to return to their homeland, but the Russian government did not begin to do this.
French trace
Traces of the French stay in Russia can be seen throughout the country. In Moscow today, there are about a dozen families whose ancestors once did not want to return to France - Autsy, Junkerovs, Zhandra, Bushenyovs. But the Chelyabinsk region occupies a special place here. Why? More on that later.
In the first half of the 19th century, on the outskirts of Samara, there was a toponym "Frantsuzova Mill". This is evidence that French prisoners were working at the mill that once worked.
And in modern Syktyvkar (formerly Ust-Sysolsk, Vologda province) there is a suburb of Paris. According to legend, its foundation is also the work of the captured French.
The French also left their mark in the Russian language. Hungry and frozen Napoleonic soldiers, begging the Russian peasants for shelter and bread, often addressed them as "cher ami" ("dear friend"). And when they needed a horse, they pronounced this word in their native language - "cheval". So the great and mighty was replenished with slang words - "ball skier" and "trash".
The famous Russian economist, the son of the Smolensk landowner, Yuri Arnold, left us memories in which he told about a Napoleonic soldier named Grazhan, who became his tutor. The boy doted on the "uncle" who taught him to make a fire, put up a tent, shoot and drum. In 1818, the parents sent their son to the Moscow noble boarding school. The teachers were shocked. Not so much from Yuri's fluency in French, as from the slang expressions that the teenager used to “sprinkle”: “Eat, assholes!” or "Crawling like a pregnant louse on shit" - this is how they sound when translated into Russian.
From Napoleon to Cossacks
Napoleon, who uttered the famous phrase “Give me some Cossacks, and I will go all over Europe with them,” and could not have thought that soon his soldiers would join this formidable army. But the adaptation took place gradually. Historians are collecting information bit by bit and reconstructing the picture of the assimilation of former Napoleonic soldiers in Russia.
For example, Professor Sirotkin in the Moscow archives came across the trail of a small Napoleonic community in Altai. The documents say that three French soldiers - Vincent, Cambrai and Louis - voluntarily left for the taiga (Biysk district), where they received land and were assigned to the peasants.
Historian Vladimir Zemtsov discovered that at least 8 thousand Napoleon prisoners visited the Perm and Orenburg provinces, several dozen of them were imperial officers. About a thousand died, and many after the conclusion of the peace wished to return home.
The French were received with all the hospitality. Those dressed out of season were outfitted with sheepskin coats, woolen trousers, boots and mittens; the sick and wounded were immediately sent to military hospitals; hungry - fed. Some of the captured officers were taken by the Russian nobles for their maintenance.
Non-Lieutenant Rüppel recalled how he lived in the family of the Orenburg landowner Plemyannikov, where, by the way, he met the historian Nikolai Karamzin. And the Ufa nobles arranged endless dinners, dances and hunts for the captured French officers, challenging the right to invite them to their place first.
It should be noted that the French accepted Russian citizenship timidly, as if choosing between a shameful return to their homeland and complete uncertainty.
In the entire Orenburg province, there were 40 such people - 12 of them wished to join the Cossack army.
The archives have preserved the names of 5 daredevils who at the end of 1815 applied to become Russian citizens: Antoine Berg, Charles Joseph Bouchen, Jean Pierre Binelon, Antoine Vikler, Edouard Langlois. Later they were assigned to the Cossack estate of the Orenburg army.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, there were about two hundred Cossacks with French roots in the Orenburg army.
And on the Don, at the end of the 19th century, local historians found 49 descendants of Napoleonic soldiers who enrolled in the Cossacks. It was not so easy to find them: for example, Gendre turned into Zhandrov, and Binelon into Belov.
To defend new frontiers
The county town of Verkhneuralsk (now the Chelyabinsk region) at the beginning of the 19th century was a small fort that guarded the southeastern borders of Russia from the raids of Kazakh batyrs. By 1836, it became necessary to strengthen this bridgehead, for which the construction of the New Line began: soon from Orsk to the village of Berezovskaya, a chain of Cossack settlements - redoubts grew, four of which received French names: Fer-Champenoise, Arcy, Paris and Brienne. Among others, all the French Cossacks with their families were resettled to the New Line.
In response to the increase in the number of Cossack troops, the Kazakh sultan Kenesary Kasymov launched large-scale hostilities. Now the gray-haired Napoleonic veterans were again forced to return to the half-forgotten military craft, but now to protect the interests of the new fatherland.
Among the volunteers on the New Line was the aged and Russified Napoleonic soldier Ilya Kondratyevich Auts, who moved here from Bugulma with his entire large family, as well as the Orenburg Cossack Ivan Ivanovich Zhandr, born of a Frenchman and a Cossack woman. The latter eventually rose to the rank of centurion and received land in the village of Kizilskaya, Verkhneuralsky district.
Another colorful Frenchman has taken root in Orenburg - a young officer from the ancient knightly family of Desiree d'Andeville.
For some time he was engaged in teaching French. When the Neplyuevskoe Cossack military school was established in Orenburg in 1825, d'Andéville was admitted to its state and ranked among the Cossack estate as a nobleman.
In 1826 his son was born - Victor Dandeville, who continued his father's Cossack business. From the age of 18, Victor served in the military horse artillery, noted in campaigns to the Aral and the Caspian. For military distinctions, he was appointed to the post of the order chieftain of the Ural Cossack army. Subsequently, Victor Dandeville reaches new heights - he becomes a general of infantry and the commander of an army corps. He, like his crusader ancestors once, demonstrates his military prowess in battles with Muslims - in Turkestan, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia and Bulgaria.
Many captured soldiers of the Great Army ended up in the lands of the Terek Cossacks. They were almost exclusively Poles, who were traditionally called French.
In 1813, about a thousand Poles were transported to Georgievsk, the main city of the Caucasian province. Now the newly minted Cossacks had to carry out military service in one of the hottest spots of the Russian border. Some part of the Cossack Poles survived in the heat of the Caucasian War, as evidenced by the Polish surnames that are still found in the villages of the North Caucasus.