“French Cossacks“
“Anyone who reads such a title will probably doubt that the French could be or have ever been Cossacks. I can’t help but remember the anecdote about how Napoleon I asked the Don Ataman Platov to make 20 thousand Cossacks out of French natives. Meanwhile, it almost happened in reality.
When, after the flight of the French army from Moscow, the central cities of Russia were filled with French prisoners, they began to be sent to the outskirts. Some of the French prisoners thus ended up in Orenburg and, by order of the Orenburg governor Pyotr Semenovich Volkonsky, were resettled among the fortresses and stations of the Orenburg province. By the way, among such exiles, Baron Bugoen, the personal adjutant of Marshal Ney, ended up in Menzelinsk.
After the end of the Patriotic War, on December 14, 1815, the Highest order followed for the return of prisoners to their homeland. Most of them, on wings of joy, hurried to their relatives, but some, who should have had no relatives in their native France, accepted Russian citizenship and remained in their former places.
They were offered to enlist in the Cossacks and all the prisoners who remained in the Verkhneuralsk district, namely: Anthony Berg, Charles-Joseph Bouchen, Jacques-Pierre Binslon, Anton Wikler and Eduard Langlois, wished to be Cossacks and were assigned to the Orenburg Cossack troops, and, of course , subsequently got married.
The latest statistics on the Orenburg army confirm that among the Orenburg Cossacks there are still descendants of captured Frenchmen, of whom there are 39 people
(“Orenburg Provincial Gazette”, August 8, 1892)
Among the descendants of the “Orenburg French” there were even generals of the Russian Imperial Army. For example, Victor Dandeville took part in the Turkestan campaigns and the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878.
Very curious episodes also happened to the captured soldiers of Napoleon’s “Great Army”:
“One landowner of the Tambov province, lieutenant of the Tambov infantry regiment Pushkin, returning from the “Battle of Borisov”, on the way captured some Frenchman, almost frozen, and brought him to his village, where he was going to improve his health due to a wound he received in the battle . The Pushkin family received Demoutier (that was the Frenchman’s name) more than kindly. They warmed him, fed him, clothed him and gave him a separate room in the hope of having a gifted teacher of the French language and “all other sciences,” since we had the conviction that every Frenchman, no matter who he was, was certainly an educated person.
The prisoner lived in complete contentment, which he probably never saw in his happy France. They soon became inextricable friends with Lieutenant Pushkin: together they went to visit their neighboring landowners and together they organized noisy orgies and drinking bouts. Often, under the influence of wine fumes, friends entered into an exemplary battle or, in official language, “They fought as if in war.” But they must have been overzealous in showing off their prowess. It was unbearable for those at home to look at exemplary battles and Pushkin’s mother, the colonel’s widow, was forced to make a complaint to the commander-in-chief in St. Petersburg that her “son, Lieutenant Pushka, was behaving indecently, and with him the captured Frenchman Demoutier was taking part in rioting and drunkenness.” .
S.K. Vyazmitinov wisely disposed of the daredevils. The Tambov governor was ordered to “conduct Demoutier to live in Orenburg under proper guard, and Lieutenant Pushkin to immediately report to his regiment.”
(“Russian Archive”, 1896)
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