Many soldiers of the Napoleonic wars, from all the nations involved, wrote memoirs about their experience. In fact, throughout the 19th century, the Napoleonic war memoir was a cottage industry, notably in France and Great Britain. These books came in all shapes and styles, were widely reprinted and translated, and generated a lot of interest, to the point that books were made to "fact-check" some of them. There are hundreds of French memoirs with titles like "Recollections of a...", "Memoirs to serve the history of...", "Notebooks of...", "Diaries of...", etc. (Dwyer, 2011). For the Peninsular war alone, for instance, Greig (2021) has identified 253 memoirs written by French, British, and Spanish veterans. These memorialists represented a small proportion of the several millions of soldiers (2.6 million for France alone) who participated in these wars (Dwyer, 2010), mostly due to poor literacy: it has been estimated that only 10% of the French soldiers could write (Houdecek, 2013). Most of the memoirs were written by low-ranking, but relatively well educated, officers or NCOs rather than by enlisted men. However, they did offer a perspective of the war by the "common man" that was radically different from the one found in traditional memoirs written by generals: veterans talked lively about the daily life of the soldier, about blood, fear, unpaid wages, hunger, cold, petty officers, glory (or lack thereof), and comradeship.

Some veterans published their memoirs in the first half of the century, disseminating them through regular publishers or having them printed and circulated locally for their families and friends. The market may have become saturated and public interest decreased in the 1850s. There was a second wave of Napoleonic memoirs after 1870 and the trauma of the Franco-Prussian war, and a third wave from 1880 to 1914. By then, those memoirs were published by family members - often the son or grandson of the veteran - or by scholars. In all cases, these were "relived" narratives, written (sometimes ghostwritten by professional writers called teinturiers, ie "dyers") and edited years or even decades after the facts.

In 1851, 75-year-old Napoleonic veteran Jean-Roch Coignet published in his memoirs, titled Les Vieux de la Vieille !. Writing was not natural to him. Born in 1776 in a peasant family, he had ran away when he was 8 to escape a wicked stepmother, and he had never been to school. It is only in 1808, at 33, that he was to read and write at the Ecole Régimentaire. In 1848, forty years later and now retired in Auxerre, Coignet began to write his memoirs, filling nine large notebooks with his nice script and uncertain spelling. The manuscript was edited with difficulty by a pair of attorneys, and published by a local printer. Coignet sold the book for 5 francs to the travelling salesmen who stopped at the cafe where he spent his days. At his death in 1865, he left 700 francs to organize a feast where his readers were invited.

A copy eventually found its way in a bouquiniste stall on the left bank of the Seine in Paris, where it caught the attention of philologist and librarian Lorédan Larchey. Larchey first published some excerpts in a magazine, and later acquired the original manuscript from Coignet's estate. He re-edited the entire book (about half of it had been left out in the original version), and published it in 1883 as Les cahiers du Capitaine Coignet. The book was an instant success, and several editions followed, including a particularly beautiful one with colour plates (Coignet, 1896).

Part of the success of the book was due to the fact that Coignet had followed Napoléon during the entire imperial period, taking part in many of the Emperor's legendary battles. He was already 23 when he was conscripted in 1799. During the next 16 years, he fought in nine of Napoléon's campaigns :

Italy (1800): battles of Montebello and Marengo

Austria (1805): battles of Ulm, Vienna and Austerlitz

Prussia (1806-1807): battles of Iena and Friedland

Spain (1808): battle of Somo-Sierra, taking of Madrid

Austria (1809): battles of Thann, Abensberg, Eckmühl, taking of Vienna, battles of Essling, Enzersdorf, Wagram

Russia (1812): battles of Smolensk, Moskowa, Malo-Jaroslawetz

Germany (1813): battles of Lutzen, Bautzen, Wurtchen, Dresde, Hanau

France (1814): battles of Brienne, Montmirail, Montereau, Craonne

Belgium (1815): battles of Charleroi and Waterloo

Coignet spent most of his service as a Grenadier in the Imperial Guard. He was made a Corporal in 1807, a Sargent in 1809, a Lieutenant in 1812, and finally rose to the rank of Captain in 1813. He was one of the first soldiers to be awarded the Légion d'Honneur, in 1804, and he was made an Officier of the Légion in 1831. Despite his long career, Coignet was never wounded.

After the fall of the Empire, Coignet retired in Auxerre, got married, and became a winegrower and a shopkeeper. He had an uneasy life during the first years of Restauration. Praising Napoléon could land someone in jail, and, as a former Napoleonic officer, he found himself under surveillance. He was eventually cleared in 1822 and could go on with his life and even collect his full pension. His last military appearance took place during the July Revolution of 1830, where he was appointed flag-bearer of the National Guard.

Coignet's colourful narrative is "like listening to an old veteran spinning war stories in a tavern" (as mentioned in the blurb of a modern English translation), which was what he actually did in Auxerre. How true it is has been hotly debated since the publication by Larchey, who himself says in the introduction:

Do Coignet's memories have the value of a history book? It is not there, any more than in the Iliad, that I will look for what are called truths of fact. No, I have not even dwelt on their discussion or rectification! The interest lies elsewhere. Like all those who fight, our soldier cannot give you the details of an army's operations, but he gives what the precision of a major staff bulletin cannot.

As noted by Weber (1981) and more recently by Hopkin (2004), Coignet's stories have often a fairytale aspect as "he mixed fiction and fact in his account and took folkloric motifs to fashion his memoirs". His first exploit as a new recruit is to capture a gun in the battle of Montebello, and he kills five men in one blow, echoing the Brave Little Tailor of the Brothers Grimm:

As I did not hear the captain's command, I was left entirely exposed. I rushed past our drummers, towards the gun, and fell upon the gunners. They were loading again, and did not see me. I bayoneted all five of them, then leaped upon the piece, and my captain embraced me as he went by!

Another soldier with an extensive Napoleonic career is Léon-Michel Routier. Born in 1778, he started his military career at 15 in 1793 by following his father in the Republican Army during the War in the Vendée. He came home after 4 years of a war that left him "disgusted by the job", but he was conscripted in 1799. From then to 1815, he participated in several campaigns, first in Germany and Switzerland (1799-1800), and then in Italy (1801-1810, 1813-1814) and Spain (1811-1812), fighting in 7 major battles and 53 lesser ones (he missed Waterloo). Unlike Coignet, he was mostly involved in lesser known fights, but was severely wounded four times. He was made a Sous-Lieutenant in 1812, and a Lieutenant and then a Captain in 1813, earning his Légion in 1814. His memoir, Récits d'un soldat de la République et de l'Empire, was published in 1899 by his son. It is more factual than Coignet's, and Routier is generally more critical of the military. In fact, early in his career, he "joined" the armée roulante, this informal group of soldiers who evaded fighting by bouncing from one regiment to another using falsified or borrowed paper routes. He did settle in the military life, however, and he was part of the units that helped Napoléon return to power after his exile in Elba. His career did not stop after the Empire, and he remained in the army. His service had spanned 5 regimes: the Republic, the Consulate, the Empire, the Restauration, and the July Monarchy. He managed to escape being sent to Algeria in the early 1830s and retired in 1833.

Sources

• Coignet, Jean-Roch. Aux Vieux de la vieille ! Souvenirs de Jean-Roch Coignet. Auxerre: Perriquet, 1851.

• Coignet, Jean-Roch. Les cahiers du capitaine Coignet : (1776-1850). Edited by Lorédan Larchey. Paris: Hachette et Cie, 1896. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6353284m.

• Dwyer, Philip G. ‘Public Remembering, Private Reminiscing: French Military Memoirs and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’. French Historical Studies 33, no. 2 (1 April 2010): 231–58. https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-2009-026.

• Dwyer, Philip. ‘War Stories: French Veteran Narratives and the “Experience of War” in the Nineteenth Century’. European History Quarterly 41, no. 4 (1 October 2011): 561–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265691411419471.

• Greig, Matilda. Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808-1914. Oxford University Press, 2021. https://books.google.fr/books?id=GuEsEAAAQBAJ.

• Hopkin, David. ‘Storytelling, Fairytales and Autobiography: Some Observations on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memoirs’. Social History 29, no. 2 (1 May 2004): 186–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/0307102042000207840.

• Routier, Léon-Michel. Récits d’un soldat de la République et de l’Empire : 1792-1830. Paris: Vermot, Editeur, 1899. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1417085p.

• Weber, Eugen. ‘Fairies and Hard Facts: The Reality of Folktales’. Journal of the History of Ideas 42, no. 1 (1981): 93–113. https://doi.org/10.2307/2709419.