"French 8Ibs Companies." Topic

At some time the before 1809 the French reorganised their whole artillery and all their 8Ibs guns went to Spain or were put in store. Having said that Davout's III Corps in the Austrian 1809 campaign had some 8Ibs companies.
Due to the loss of so much French guns in Russia did the French start using any 8Ibs still in Central Europe for the 1813-14 campaigns? Can't see any references in and OBs?

Don't have it in front of me, but you might want to check Scott Bowden's "Napoleon's Grande Armee of 1813." It has French OOB data down to the gun type in each battery; can't speak for the whole Grande Armee, but IIRC, the Guard artillery by that point was comprised of 6lb for the horse batteries and 12 lb for the foot.

Bowden shows no 8pdrs, just 6 & 12 pdrs.

May have just been to simplify logistics. There were a lot of captured Prussian & Austrian 6 pounders in Germany.

You may have looked already but Nafziger's OOB only shows 6pdrs. However, not every battery's guns are listed.

Your best bet may be to find a list of captured guns (there were 325).

A couple of comments.
6pdrs for one country was not the same as 6pdrs in another country.
Two types of barrels were iron and bronze. A soldier would ge a higher reward if a captured gun was bronze rather than iron. Bronze could be melted down and recast at the measurements needed.
French policy was to replace a foreign country units 12 and 6 pers when they were about to enter Spain and give the m4p Dr and Spanish 6pdr.

I've found 2 8pdr batteries listed in Smith "1813 Leipzig". One is in the Imperial Guard 1st Division and the other is in the IG Reserve Artillery. Each is of 8 guns. Smith lists his source as Ihbe, Nafziger shows these as 6pdrs.

Litre, E, Les Régiments d'Artillerie à Pied de la Garde, le Régiment Monté de la Garde et la 23e Régiment d'Artillerie, Notice Historique, (Paris: Plon. 1895) link does point firmly to the Guard being armed with 6pdrs & 12pdrs – not 8pdrs!

Although Digby-Smith cites Peter Ihbe of Dessau as his source for the 8pdrs, his work is not among the list in the bibliography so one cannot cross-check. However Digby-Smith does cite a number of works Ihbe used, so at least I will be able to follow up.

But based on what I have seen so far, I am thinking 8pdrs are a "red herring".

Digby Smith is mistaken for 1813. They should be 6x AnXI 6-pdrs and 2 AnXI 24-pdr howitzers

1809 was the last hurrah for the 8-pdr and 4-pdr outside the Peninsula. Spain had Gribeauval guns so had large stocks of 4-pdr and 8-pdr shot. Also much of the French artillery was actually mostly Spanish.