delanceyplace.com 3/19/08 - army deserters
In today's excerpt - desertion and disarray in Napoleon's Paris. Under Napoleon, warfare had reached an unprecedented scale, with record numbers of soldiers and casualties—and record levels of desertion as well. With a continental war and a British blockade both added to the aftereffects of the French Revolution, Paris was overwhelmed with poverty and chaos—and increasingly embraced diversions, from gambling to prostitution, and looked to the black markets of the underground:
"Much of the incidental robbery and violence on the streets of Paris was caused by licentious soldiery on leave, deserters or draft-dodgers. There were numerous ways of avoiding the call to arms, such as chopping off a finger or knocking out front teeth (without which a soldier could not tear open a musket cartridge), and it seemed significant that, in 1806 ... there were only 14,300 Parisians in military service out of a population of nearly 600,000. By 1810, the rate of desertion from the Grande Armee had become alarming, and many deserters had taken refuge among the criminal underclass in Paris. Parisiennes had been delighted by dashing cavalry officers bowing to them with enormous plumes, and the handsome veterans would be applauded when they paraded on the Carrousel—but for the rest of the time the soldiery were the terror of Paris, recognized for their brutality toward inoffensive citizens.
"One soldier relieved himself over customers in an underground cafe, and when a waiter reproached him, he was beaten up; at the door of the Senate, a young man was cut to pieces by an infantry sergeant for bumping up against him; at Montrouge, three soldiers disemboweled a stranger, on the ground that he had 'looked at them in an insulting manner.' Six soldiers raped a respectable woman at the Port-au-Ble, then threw her into the Seine. And so it went on. ...
"Despite all the efforts of [Minister of Police] Fouche, supported by all the trappings of a police state, lawlessness persisted in Paris. As the effects of the British blockade bit deeper so smuggling became a major Parisian industry, and with the involvement of army deserters and even senior officers, tended to be run like a military operation. ...
"Marvelously described in Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin, men who had lost their fortune on the tables in a matter of hours would be conducted into a 'recovery' room also known as a salles des blesses. Nearby was a gunsmith's selling pistols, also inhabited by a former priest. Thus it was said in a space of a few hours, victims could 'be ruined, commit suicide, and pass into a better world with the help of religion.' ... Relaxation of morals under the Revolution had resulted in a galloping increase in venereal disease, and the 'progress of immorality' had demanded the creation of a special hospital in the vacant Capuchin monastery in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques ... which had an enormous waiting list."
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