"engineers (fr. genie), sappers and pioneers " Topic

What's the difference between the engineers (fr. genie), sappers and pioneers ?

Sappers were selected specialists in the grenadier companies of infantry regiments who seem to have played a multiplicity of roles, including smashing in doors. They were expected to be resourceful, skilled, and experienced- equally at home improvising a solution and leading an assault. Those skills probably came in particularly handy at sieges, when the PBI were put to work making gabions and fascines and the like.

"Genie" were a separate branch, with distinct regiments and battalions of specialists who could do a lot of what we think of as "engineer" tasks, including bridge building, although the French Army also had a subset of the artillery known as "pontoniers" who specialized in that. They were often broken up and assigned, company by company, to the various army corps.
The sappers looked like your mental image of sappers: big guys, grenadier caps, aprons,axes and beards. It wasn't until I got my hands on a copy of the Elting/Knotel "Napoleonic Uniforms" that I realized I had mistakenly painted up a whole bunch of sappers as engineers. Still use them, though; the engineer uniforms are cut like standard French uniforms, but the colors were different.

If you look at the French terminology, sapeurs seem to be what you would call "pioneers" in English, the were part of the engineer (génie) corps:

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The sapeurs were used during sieges for – sapping ;-)

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The sapeurs in the infantry described by 9lb were were a different from the sapeurs of the corps du génie.

The pontoniers were integral part of the artillery corps:

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Seeking enlightenment I started a lively thread at the NWF site last year. Some useful information emerged amidst some circular discussions relating to accurate terminology.

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«pioneers» has a very similar very less rewarding meaning and history than the Engineer arm's sappers and miners in both French Army and British Army, this one having also a separate Pioneer Corps former Labour Corps not at all merged with the Engineer Corps in WW2 exactly like in the French Army history

it is only with the German Army where there is a difference : the German «Pioneers» are the French or British Sappers of their Engineers Arm

the "pioneers" is a title for labour infantry units in the French Army from 1772 to last Pioneers units in 1958,
under Napoleon and during XIXth century the various French pioneers units are disciplinary or labour auxiliary units belonging to the Infantry arm : Black Pioneers, White Pioneers, Colonial, Foreign and French Spanish Pioneers Battalions and Companies etc…in 1818 the title remained only for the last worst disciplinary companies of the French Army, it is only thanks to the World Wars the French Pioneers could recover some "dignity" as it was given to name more respectable veteran reserve labour units of the Infantry