Drafted into the French Army in 1799, Jean-Roch Coignet, would go onto serve in the Napoleonic campaigns for the next sixteen years.
Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Spain, Wagram, the retreat from Russia, Leipzig and Waterloo; Coignet fought in most of the major battles of the Napoleonic Wars.
Despite being an illiterate peasant of short stature he was quickly noticed by his generals and within his first four years he was selected for the Grenadiers of the Old Guard, a force affectionally named the Grumblers by Napoleon.
Rising through the ranks to his eventual position of Captain, Coignet provides a fascinating depiction of life not as a General but as an ordinary soldier in the French army.
He uncovers life in the garrison and on the march and demonstrates the truth in Napoleon’s maxim: “An army marches on its stomach.”
Coignet explains the details of his various campaigns from his moments of heroism, such as when he received a musket of honor for single-handedly capturing an Austrian cannon at the Battle of Montebello, to the more mundane, yet still fascinating, details of the day-to-day life in the Guards and protecting Napoleon’s household.
His memoirs are particularly opinionated and are enlivened by his pithy comments on the events that he witnessed.
Captain Coignet: A Soldier of Napoleon's Imperial Guard from the Italian Campaign to Waterloo is essential reading for anyone interested in the Napoleonic Wars and the lives of the soldiers that fought in it.
Jean-Roch Coignet was a French soldier who served the First French Empire from 1799 to 1815. He fought in sixteen campaigns and forty-eight battles, never having been wounded. His memoirs were first published under the title The Notebooks of Captain Coignet in 1890 and he died in 1865.
