"Gendarmes d'élite of the Imperial Guard in action" Topic

Not to diss Mercer, but he had not been in action since 1807, and had never been previously in action against the French Army. Even among the Peninsular veterans, there cannot have been many who had seen a cuirassier, a horse grenadier, or a gendarme d'elite in the field. Add to that the smoke, the speed of events, the weather, the numerous competing demands on his attention, and the intensity of his experience of battle, and my guess is he had only the vaguest idea of what he actually saw.

I know the first time I got shot at, my post-hoc recollections of what I had seen did not correspond closely with the recollections of the people around me, as to who was where, and doing what. Memory can be a very unreliable quantity.

Remembering with advantages… ;-)

Now if anyone wants to compare French dragoon helmets with cuirassier helmets, then there is a case for that.

In order to 'disguise' dragoons as cuirassiers when facing Cossacks who had hurt dragoon units, routing some, French cavalry commanders would 'sandwich' dragoon and cuirassier squarons and as both dragoons and cuirassiers wore white cloaks in bad weather, some Cossacks received a rude awakening when they believed them to be all dragoons.

The Emsley book is indeed excellent, and Radet seems to have been truly remarkable – effectively the founder of the modern French police, and their ranking "professional" officer, double-hatting in charge of the military police of the main campaign army from 1813.

Radet was also the officer in command of the kidnapping of the pope-an event that the pope so richly deserved.

A Passing Scotsman, yes, we can find answers (often the balance of probabilities) through multiple perspectives in the context of surrounding events and evidence.

However, as Nine Pound Round points out, there are multiple reasons why those on the ground may have not just been misinformed regarding what they saw*, but misremembering, with official accounts not helping.
George Macdonald Fraser makes this point in ‘The Whisky and the Music' with reference to Piper Findlater, who himself wasn't entirely sure what he'd played for the Gordon Highlanders to earn his VC in Afghanistan. As GMF closes the story though, his Colonel points out that despite all the debate, it was Cock O' the North…because the RSM said so.

On top of official documents, formal letters and treaties, this era is probably the first with large numbers of memoirs at the tactical level, due in part to higher literacy levels and public appetite for fiction and non-fiction, yet those writing will have a much more narrow understanding of their context than most West Europeans today. I think many forget how much greater the knowledge base becomes within a few decades, but most 19th century writers and artists onwards only having access to a fraction of it, a part of the elephant. This is why determining who is providing evidence, for what purpose and audience and their proximity to events all need to be considered.

* this continues on – in WW2, Panzer IVs were often mistaken for Tigers due to similarities in turret shape, especially with Schurzen.

One of the reasons Mercer is hard to read nowadays is that a lot of his journal is elaborate descriptions of the fabulously exotic sights of…Belgium.

While the sheer level of detail about dates, locales, house interiors etc shows him to have made detailed observations at the time, it's equally still clear that notes he made about what he saw in action were made hours or days after the fact and concerned observations made when he was thoroughly preoccupied. I tend to believe him while recognising that he could occasionally have been mistaken.

+1 4th Cuirassier

One of the more interesting parts of the memoir is Mercer's telling of having to 'forage' to feed men and horses, against the express orders of Wellington.

See pages 90-91 in Chapter VIII. Mercer uses the term 'plundering' which is more than interesting.

deadhead – with regard to the red lapels, do you mean the Gendarmerie des Chasses?

I understand (from an old Carnet de la Sabretache article somewhere on Gallica) that the reconstituted Gd'É got hold of their old headgear very promptly at the start of the Cent Jours (Napoleon took one look at them in their shiny new helmets doing guard duty on the Carousel, and faced with Imperial displeasure, they hastily found where they'd been stored)… I'd imagine that the new helmets were aded back into the mix once they ran short of old caps from store?

Brechtel198: I don't have the Elting uniform volume, but here's a pic (off pinterest!) of an original helmet:

The plate with the lillies would obviously be off during the Cent Jours. Maybe just my way of seeing things, but the combination of turban, bright steel helmet, brass upright and black crest seems more significant than the specifics of shape (especially considering the variety of patterns the cuirassiers used)…

Mistaking cloaked cuirassiers for cloaked dragoons seemed to happen a lot – I recall reading about that incident with the dragoon-and-cuirassier mix (from Elting?), but also in a skirmish c. 1807, where Prussian uhlans and hussars mistook Le Harivel de Gonneville's foraging party from 6e Cuirassiers, and at Quatre Bras when 8e Cuirassiers rode up (Sergeant McSween of 42nd, who was good enough to have a guess at which specific French lancer regiment was charging him while everyone else was thinking they were Black Brunswickers or Belgian Carabiniers come to round up the French infantry, was confident that the second wave were just dragoons until his battalion's musket volley bounced straight off)…

nine pound round, La Belle Ruffian, 4th Cuirassier – oh, I agree in principle about the unreliability of sources. I sometimes think that reality dissolves a little at these points. And sometimes, a narrative gets accepted that has no close relation to events (a little out-of-period, Rocroi looks like an excellent example of this).

But where the details an eyewitness gives add up to something different than what they consciously conclude (in this case, matching Gd'É better than GàC), I think there's a question worth pursuing.

(My own suspicion is that Piper Findlater was playing Highland Laddie, and the tune better known internationally as "Donkey Riding" was unacceptable for propaganda purposes)

You do not, of course, have to agree!

'You do not, of course, have to agree!'

I'd drink to that, if the pubs were open.

I was really saying how the uniform evolved according to fashion, yet preserved the distinctive red lapels, in the post Napoleonic Royal era.

The helmet above must be a trumpeter's if the crest and mane are original.

A few of many pics to show the "Bardin" look for these later gents;

When the Bardin uniform regulations went into effect, they had no impact on the Imperial Guard, as the Guard had its own uniform regulations.

Oh indeed, plus this was adopted well after Napoleon's second departure and the Second Restoration. I stress I was referring to a "Bardin" look to their jackets, but with very long coat tails of course.

Another change seems to have been the swap of the aiguillettes to the right side, as for officers formerly. In many pictures I have this applies irrespective of the left epaulette being fringed or plain.

La Belle Ruffian – cheers!!

deadhead – ahah! I'd thought the crest had just faded down (in the same way that old academic gowns go from black to green), or been false-coloured in an old photograph, but that makes a lot of sense…

And am I remembering right that the aguilette on the right shoulder came in with the uniform modifications for 1er Cuirassiers in 1814?

I'm wanting to draw a line back from that long-tailed, "Bardin"-lapelled tunic to the pre-revolutionary cavalry regulations which insisted that the front should be able to fasten all the way down…

The red fur look could well be faded "black". In mammals there is no such thing as true black. Melanin is the pigment and it is a very dark brown. Highly concentrated, e.g. sunlight exposure on central African skin, or a melanoma, it can be rad to tell from black. But any black horse, close up, is not so. A brown will fade to red eventually…..but this looks very even and I think it started out much redder.

The Dragoons and Grenadiers of the Guard wore the aigulettes on the right

The Imperial Gendarmes d'Elite on the left.

Every Royalist Household Cavalry unit I can find wore them on the right. But of course when ever you say always;

>>The Imperial Gendarmes d'Elite on the left.

The rank and file, not officers…

deadhead – oh, I think you could be right about the red plume.

And thanks for the correction on the aguilettes – and the evidence that sometimes, things don't seem to follow the rules at all!!

The point about the side for the officers is well worth repeating. As I said above;

"Another change seems to have been the swap of the aiguillettes to the right side, as for officers formerly."

I did wonder if all members of the Maison du Roi held officer rank, but for every unit you see some with fringed epaulettes on the left and some without.

Above all I agree, there is no hard and fast rule here and, in any uniform, there is probably a transition period or artists working from recent memory.

If you want, another mystery to feed the fantasy of hope…
lesapn.forumactif.fr/t12658-identification-uniforme .

Two pictures, an actual miniature portrait and a print of another lesser known (but collateral) unit…

a la Restauration of course…
d
[In my world, china is the only restoration necessary…]

Well, there's another example of lapels that do button closed… though I don't think there's any reason to think they were at Waterloo, were they?

Royalist soldiers were refused by DoW as worse than useless and an encumbrance. The few Household troops stayed with Louis XVIII's "palace in exile", in Ghent.

Some well known vestiges of Royalist uniforms seen south of the ridge though. The helmets of the First Chasseurs a Cheval or of the Gendarmes d'Elite, as above, not to mention the countless shako plates with their tops missing.

I hadn't realised that the Chaseurs were given helmets too. Old shako plates are no real surprise, surely, given how much the shako cover and greatcoat were used as infantry campaign uniform (and I suppose old shakos could be worn by Dutch-Belgians/Nassauers, as well…?)

The only French Chasseur a Cheval regiment that I am aware of that were issued helmets by the Bourbons in 1814 was the 1st Chasseurs. And apparently, it was worn by the regiment in Belgium.