In June 1812, the unstoppable wave of Napoleon's hordes of six hundred thousand overwhelmed the borders of the Russian Empire, under the thunder of guns and gunfire it reached Moscow itself, flooded the First Throne, and in the autumn rushed away in a muddy stream.
Back, outside the borders of the then Russia, in December of the same year, only a miserable stream of forty thousand ragged men flowed out - all that remained of the once Great Army. What happened to the rest of the soldiers of the French emperor?
Combat losses of the French amounted to about two hundred thousand soldiers and officers. These are the ones that fell in battles, froze, drowned, died of hunger and disease, or simply disappeared in the Russian expanses. Another one hundred and thirty thousand, mainly from the troops of the allied monarchies, deserted. And about two hundred thousand were captured by Russian.
The fates of the captured combatants developed in different ways. Those who fell into the hands of partisans or Cossacks, as a rule, faced certain death. The French, captured during the battles with the army, were settled throughout the country. At the same time, senior officers were taken to St. Petersburg, and the rest were distributed to peasant households. Often the Cossacks who escorted them sold Napoleon's soldiers to wealthy peasants and landowners as labor.
It happened that landowners simply registered prisoners as their serfs. And not all of them managed to subsequently gain freedom and return to their homeland. But a considerable number of Frenchmen, in search of food and lodging for the night, continued to wander through the Russian villages and villages for a long time. Begging for alms, they turned to the residents: “Cher ami” (dear friend), for which they were called “ball skiers”. This word has survived to our times.
In the summer of 1813, by a government circular, prisoners were allowed to take temporary or permanent Russian citizenship and, within two months, decide on their occupation and class. There were a lot of applicants - about sixty thousand. Some joined the artisans, some became workers at state-owned factories, others - into the peasant class, some became valets, tutors and teachers.
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As a rule, the oaths changed their surnames in the local manner, and after a generation, their descendants already considered themselves Russian. It is curious that a considerable number of prisoners enrolled in the Cossack estate. They were accepted with great pleasure - the Russian Empire needed experienced soldiers to guard the borders.
The archives store a lot of information about the French Cossacks as part of the Orenburg, Terek and Kuban Cossack troops. Traces of the French presence are also preserved in toponymy. This, for example, is evidenced by the names of the villages of Arsi, Paris and Kassel in the Chelyabinsk region.
French historian Jean Tulard wrote:
When the retreating left Smolensk, the temperature dropped to minus twenty, and sometimes to minus thirty degrees. Short winter days illuminated a long line of people wrapped in rags from head to toe. They dragged along, leaving corpses, guns and carts in the snow. But it was much more terrible to fall into the hands of Platov's Cossacks, who were constantly attacking the column.
The peasants bought French prisoners to boil them in a cauldron or impale them. A French soldier cost two rubles.
The fates of individual French combatants are so amazing that they are quite worthy of an adventure novel. A certain furrier (cavalry non-commissioned officer) Georges Despres was captured near Maloyaroslavets. Despres himself did not differ in anything special from his other compatriots. Unless the fact that he was incredibly foolish.
They say that poor Georges was even nicknamed "Immortal" in the regiment on the grounds that the tip of his nose was bent almost close to his mouth, so that the last breath of the lucky man was obliged, according to the laws of physics, to return through his nostrils to his lungs, and therefore the process of life became endless.
In Russia, the Frenchman had a chance to try and change many professions. Among them are such exotic as the poet-improviser, midwife, bath attendant, card sharper, horse dealer, Italian tenor and auditor of the Holy Synod. It is impossible to tell about all his adventures in one article, we will mention only a few.
Once Despres came up with the idea of becoming an adherent of white magic. Fortunately, from his uncle, the Marseilles magician, as a child, he learned several simple tricks. And in the spring of 1820, posters appeared in Moscow about the upcoming speech of the professor of white magic, Ivan Avgustovich Despres.
The performance included the long-standing focus of decapitating a living person, with posters stating that "Messrs. Physicians and chemists, as well as everyone, will be invited to the stage to examine the corpse and certify the genuineness of the blood flowing from the severed head."
Everything would be fine, but poor Despres did not take into account the savagery of ordinary Moscow inhabitants. On the appointed day, the theater was packed. However, as soon as the promised decapitation began, the entire audience poured onto the stage. The Dodger begged to be given the opportunity to complete the trick, pledging to explain how he does it, but nothing helped.
Abuse and accusations of malicious deception and godless robbery of an honest public fell on his head. You see, she wanted the illusionist to really amuse her with the spectacle of guillotining. Yes, so that there was more blood.
The shocked "professor of white magic" tried to reason with the Muscovites, saying that he couldn't really cut off the head of a living person. After all, for this they are exiled to Siberia to hard labor. But the audience remained relentless, and the failed magician had to hastily retreat from the theater, and soon flee from the Mother See, as the police received a denunciation of "a cruel-hearted French robber conducting nightmarish experiments on living people."
Subsequently, Georges Despres joined a gang of robbers that traded in the forests near Yaroslavl, then he was caught, beaten with a whip and exiled to eternal hard labor. But on the way, when the convicts were being transported across some Siberian river, in spite of the shackles, Despres jumped off the ferry. Further, the information differs: according to the testimony of the guards, he was drowned, and according to the words of other convicts, he safely reached the shore and disappeared into the taiga. If the latter is true, then Despres has fully justified his old military nickname.
And here is a completely different story. Officer Antoine de Lamotte came from an ancient knightly family, known since the First Crusade. After his capture, he took Russian citizenship and settled in Georgievsk, the main city of the Terek army, where he was ranked among the Cossack estate as a nobleman.
In 1827, his son Victor Antoineovich Delamot was born, who also chose the military path. Having started his service in horse artillery, Victor Delamot took part in the campaigns to the Aral Sea and the Caspian, like his crusader ancestors he fought against Muslims in Serbia, Bulgaria and Turkestan.
Alexei, the great-grandson of a Napoleonic officer, following family tradition, entered service in the Life Dragoon regiment in St. Petersburg. After the revolution, like many other emigrants, he ended up in Paris, where he died eight years later. They started with Paris, and finished with it 100 years later - ce la vie.
Alexander Yudin