very mutable at Verdun. Officers petitioned for their men to join them as parolees, to reunite the crew of the lost ship in one same depot, as evidenced by a successful appeal for the transfer of common sailors from Longwy to Verdun.160 By this means, but also by mass transfers orchestrated by the French State, common sailors could join the Verdun parolees, which complicated the sociology of detainees in the town.
Whilst Verdun hosted two types of captives – the civilian ‘détenus’ and military officers taken under arms, the real demarcation was the length of time spent at the depot. A line was drawn between those who were meant to dwell in the town and those whose presence was merely temporary, subject to the context of war, the varying patronage of the first group, and who experienced displacement in other depots in North-East France. The secret police records suggest that transfers strongly affected the captive population, which oscillated from 545 to 1118 male prisoners (Table 10).161 Transfers were for logistical purposes, as northern depots were repeatedly opened and closed.162 It was in this context of that certain captives found themselves in temporary residence at Verdun. On 12 November 1804, 25 merchant captains arrived from Givet, the following month 51 common soldiers were sent back to Sarrelibre.163 In May 1806, the Metz captives – mostly domestics – were sent back again to Verdun, before the arrival of a convoy of merchantmen from Valenciennes in June. This was followed by a transfer of 85 sailors from Arras in April 1811.164
160
SHD, YJ 28, Letter from the Minsitry of War to the Commandant Soyer at Verdun, 5 February 1812. 161
Ernest d’Hauterive (ed.) La Police Secrète du Premier Empire, Bulletins Quotidiens Adressés par Fouché à l’Empereur, 1804- 1807 (3 vols, Paris, 1908-1922); Ernest d’Hauterive (ed.) La Police Secrète du Premier Empire, Bulletins Quotidiens Adressés par Fouché à l’Empereur, 1808-1810 (2 vols, Paris, 1963-1964); Nicole Gotteri (ed.) La Police Secrète du Premier Empire, Bulletins Quotidiens Adressés par Savary à l’Empereur, 1810-1814 (7 vols, Paris, 1997).
162
Whilst the number of British captives’ depots increased from four in 1803 to twelve in 1810, most of them were short-lived. In 1806, 1200 prisoners were sent to a new depot in Maubeuge, which was closed the same year. Equally, The depot in Metz opened in July 1805, but was closed in Mai 1806. This engendered mass transfers. 1288 British prisoners were marched from Auxonne to Besançon in 1811. See Mark Philp (ed.), Resisting Napoleon: the British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797-1815 (London, 2006).
163
Hauterive (ed.), La Police Secrète du Premier Empire, I, pp. 129, 171, 196. 164
The ministry of war decided the temporary closure of the Arras and Valenciennes depots, so that merchant captains could ‘receive an exemplary surveillance’ after a series of escape from these depots. Ibid., II, pp. 58, 347, 445.
Three mass transfers in 1805, 1808 and 1809 (Table 10) were the result of a social selection operated at Verdun, which served as a platform to separate the wheat from the chaff amongst those who claimed their right to parole status.165 The correspondence between Wirion and Fouché, the Minister of Police, bears witness to this segregating process. As early as 1804, Wirion ordered the transfer of merchantmen to Sarrelibre, for not obtaining patronage amongst their senior captains at the depot.166 This ‘class’ was imposed by a commandant who drew a rather arbitrary line amongst merchantmen based on the tonnage of their vessels.167 Yet, this was also the result of a lack of patronage from their senior colleagues, who were permanent residents in Verdun. Considering how
165
See chapter 4 on the social selection of parolees. 166
‘Ils n’offraient plus une garantie suffisante pour être assimilés aux prisonniers sur parole et la faiblesse de la garnison ne permettant pas d’entretenir le nombre de postes nécessaires pour les garder à la citadelle … à Sarrelibre … ils seront soumis à une surveillance convenable aux prisonniers de leur classe … ils auront le traitement de soldats et de matelots’ Ibid., I, 17 Vendémiaire , 21 Brumaire, 12 Frimaire an XIII.
167
Above eighty tons, they were granted parole, under that tonnage they were sent to other non-parole depots. The question of how the French military personnel, which was renewed following the Revolution of 1789, experienced difficulties in identifying the status of the British captives, owing to a lack of common set of references, will be discussed in chapter 4. On the tonnage issue, see Booth Hyslop (ed.) Shepherd, Sailor and Survivor, p. 74.
Table 10: Number of male prisoners at Verdun from September 1804 to January 1814
the latter caused or responded to these transfers sheds another light on the parole dynamics at the depot, which were not the sole doing of the French authorities.
The transfers of servants to Metz in 1805 destabilized many détenus’ households, friendships and political views. John Maude’s diary bears witness to the repercussions of this measure for masters and servants. On 13 October, he wrote
got up at 6 to see my friends the Jacksons and Mr Blacland set off. They were about 44 in number, principally tradesmen and servants, and seemed all in good spirits. I am very sorry to lose my good friend Jackson, who is a very worthy man and the only person at Verdun whom I knew in England.168
On 26 October, he noted again:
Early this morning 20 English servants escorted by several gens d’armes were very unexpectedly sent off to Metz. Among them is my friend Edgeworth’s servant William Stone. This is a very tyrannical and arbitrary measure.
The loss of servants led him to reflect on the question of ‘humanity’ and the debates on slavery in Britain.169 Certain masters sporadically petitioned the French government for the return of their servants to Verdun, but the number of British domestics in the depot dropped significantly from eighty-free to fifteen between September 1804 and May 1811.170 Whilst in 1804 Lord Yarmouth could parade in the rue Mazel attended by, as the Verdun deputy major noted, ‘numerous servants, none of whom [were] French’, this performance changed after 1805, since captives had to employ French servants in their houses and stables.171
In 1808 and 1809, two mass confinements in the citadel followed by transfers targeted masters of merchantmen and midshipmen, who were stigmatised by the local military authorities, owing to their
168
QCL, GB/NNAF/P144289, John Barnabas Maude, ‘Journal’. 169
On the 26 October, pondering on the death of Cole, Alexander Don’s servant who contracted rabies in seclusion, he wrote that the Fox’s bill to ‘abolish the African trade … will reflect great luster and credit on the new ministry and on the country it will be a striking act of justice and of humanity’ He later added : ‘but it is in my opinion very problematical, if it will turn out a political measure – time will prove it – but I think our colonies will suffer.’ Ibid.
170
Hauterive (ed.), La Police Secrète du Premier Empire, I, 23 Fructidor an XIII ; Paul Gerbod, Voyages au Pays des Mangeurs de Grenouilles : la France Vue par les Britanniques du XVIIIe Siècle à nos Jours (Paris, 1991), p.73.
171
‘Ce seigneur a une domestique nombreuse et pas un Français à son service’. ADM-Bar, 9R2, Account from the ‘premier adjoint au maire, Varaigne-Perrin, occupant temporairement les fonctions de commissaire de police, au sous-préfet de la Meuse, sur la présence nouvelle des prisonniers anglais à Verdun’, Verdun, 26 Frimaire an XII (18 décembre 1803).
young age and repeated attempts at escape. In 1808, several paternalistic and evangelical officers offered their patronage and swore on their honour that they would be considered as ‘gentlemen’ in Britain, and that their parole should therefore be restored. William Story was thus liberated through the patronage of Lieutenant Pridham, who arranged for him to be given a passport to circulate outside the two leagues during the day.172 These arrangements based on interpersonal connections were however systematised by the French military authorities, which, in 1805, began appointing ‘senior officers’ to be taken ‘collectively responsible’ of their inferiors at the depot.173
This weakened patronage networks amongst captives. Naval and Army ‘cautionneurs’, as they were called in French, became reluctant to offer patronage as the escapes multiplied, and their young inferiors contracted debts which threatened the maintenance of the depot, and consequently their own situation as parole captives. In June 1805, Murray and Robinson, two midshipmen, made their escape after a ‘caution corps par corps’ had been agreed by their senior officers. The ‘body for body’ patronage was based on a simple principle: the patron would be deprived of his parole and sent to the citadel if his protégé attempted an escape. The escape led to a strong reaction amongst naval officers, and the most senior member of them all, Captain Edward Leveson Gower, wrote to the commandant to exclude them from the service.174 An exclusion from the profession conveniently annulled the officers’ responsibility in the matter and the potential reassessment of their parole. Naval officers proved equally vehement against civilians deserters. In May 1807, the police bulletin reported that ‘English officers made a formal complaint against Edmond Temple’, who had escaped his Verdun bankers the previous day and made his way to Austria in his mistress’ carriage.175
A sub-culture emerged amongst the captives who stayed only temporarily on parole at Verdun. First, the denial of patronage created resentment amongst sailors deprived of their parole who, like midshipman Edward Boys, calculated that their word of honour was only worth a sixth of that of their senior officers who could travel outside the gates during the day. Midshipman Robert James was more vehement in his critique of the jolly life of détenus, ‘a set of scoundrels, who never dared
172
William Story, A Journal Kept in France, during a Captivity of More than Nine Years, Commencing the 14th Day of April 1805 and Ending the 5th Day of May 1814 (London, 1815), pp. 65-6.
173
Richard Langton, Narrative of a Captivity in France from 1809 to 1814 (2 vols, Liverpool, 1836), I, p. 249; Goldworth Alger, Napoleon’s British Visitors and Captives, p. 211
174
‘Gower, capitaine de frégate de Robinson, très affecté de ce manque de parole, demande à l’amirauté de l’exclure de la marine’. Hauterive (ed.), La Police Secrète du Premier Empire, I, p. 470.
175
show their faces again in England … [and] Despards gangs; such as Taylors, and shoemakers’.176 Through their migrations to other non-parole depots, they exchanged specific stories. They discussed the mythical presence of the Duc d’Enghien at the Tour d’Angoulème, with whom they identified as wrongly detained captives. Having experienced what they called the ‘Castle of Tears’ – the basements of the fortress in Bitche – solidified their bonds particularly when they retrieved their parole status at Verdun, a couple of months later. As will be explored in chapter 7, their passage to this disciplinary depot triggered their autobiography: Thomas Dutton published sardonic poems on Verdun in 1806, Charles Sturt drafted a political pamphlet on parole and Edmund Temple, mentioned above, penned a satire on the ‘chamber pot of Lorraine’.177 The return to parole status, transient though it may have been, was celebrated humorously, detainees of the Tour d’Angoulème creating, for instance, the order of the ‘Bold Knights of the Round Tour’.178 ‘The members celebrated the anniversary of their liberation by a dinner … each appeared with the riband of the order’ and operated through singing a social inversion, by which they shifted from the status as ‘slaves’ deprived of their parole to that of resistant noblemen.179 This sub-culture crystallised in the ways prisoners portrayed themselves in their writings and drawings as marching prisoners, constantly on the road, continuously challenged in their social place, yet keeping their hats on, as evidenced by the watercolours produced by Lieutenant Langton (Fig.9).
176
Robert James, Ten Years a Captive, quoted in Fraser, Napoleon the Gaoler, pp. 113-4. 177
Edmond Temple, The Life of Pill Garlick (London and Dublin, 1815), p. 299. 178
Langton, Narrative of a Captivity in France, I, p. 254. 179
‘Ye noble hearts devoid of fear,/ Slaves to power, slaves to power;/ Spite fate we’re happy here,/ Bold Knights of the Round Tower./We’ve many toils and dangers seen,/ And drank the dregs of anguish keen;/ Till now of late, confirmed we’ve been,/ Bold Knights of the Rounder Tower.’ Ibid., I, p. 254.
Fig. 9: Sketch of captive midshipmen
The context of war and the Continental blockade in 1806, further reconfigured the status of parolees. Clothing was crucial for their daily performance. In 1803, the deputy major of Verdun had noted with astonishment that Captain Brenton paraded through the town in uniform.180 Redcoats and blue coats would keep their uniforms in captivity, unless they had to be placed in quarantine in the local hospitals, owing to a violent shipwreck or skirmish.181 The captive tailors and shoemakers would then provide them with new clothes until 1806, when they could no longer procure the materials to do so. The tailor Rietschel was ‘forced to close the shop owing to the closure of the Continent by the Emperor’ both because of a lack of ‘supplies for the prisoners’ and the pecuniary difficulties his customers experienced.182 This was problematic for the captive newcomers from naval and army services. The case of midshipman Maurice Hewson shows the social repercussions of such a shortage of British tailors to repair his uniform upon his arrival at Verdun, as he had to rely on the local hospital for his clothing. ‘Such were my necessities’, he wrote, ‘that I was indebted to the Hospital for the shirt I wore … but my shattered appearance did not create much sympathy … one of my fellow-inmates would scarcely acknowledge me’.183
National allegiances were also destabilised by the context of war. The ‘picture of Verdun’ a
détenu painted in 1806 as a harmonious microcosm where ‘all national distinctions between Irish,
Scot, and English ceased, and their only contest was to do the honors of their respective countries on their particular Saint’s day with the most hospitality’ was a clear romanticisation of inter-national relations amongst captives.184 Patron Saint’s days were popular amongst all captives, yet sociability could prove nationally exclusive. In 1804, the local newspaper, the Narrateur de la Meuse reported that one club was solely destined for Irish detainees.185 As will be discussed in chapter 3, Cornish, Yorkshire, Welsh, and Channel Island identities and networks were reaffirmed in detention, leading
180
‘Cet officier toujours en uniforme, parait plein d’honneur. ADM-Bar, 9R2, Account from the ‘premier adjoint au maire, Varaigne-Perrin, occupant temporairement les fonctions de commissaire de police, au sous-préfet de la Meuse, sur la présence nouvelle des prisonniers anglais à Verdun’, Verdun, 26 Frimaire an XII (18 December 1803).
181
Glasse, Ned Clinton, p. 118. 182
AMV, uncatalogued file, ‘Les Anglais à Verdun’, Letter of Rietschel to the mayor of Verdun, 17 May 1844. 183
Hewson, Escape from the French, pp. 59-60 184
Lawrence, A Picture of Verdun, I, pp. 90-1. 185
‘Deux clubs sont formés par ces étrangers: l’un compose tout à fait d’anglais d’origine, est ouvert chez Mr. Carron ; l’autre fréquenté par les seuls irlandais, se tient chez Mr Concanon, irlandais lui-même’. Narrateur de la Meuse, 27 September 1804; ‘CONCANNON, Lucius (c.1764-1823)’, The History of Parliament online [http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820- 1832/member/concannon-lucius-1764-1823 , accessed 8 February 2014] ; Henri Fauville, La France de Bonaparte vue par les visiteurs anglais (Aix-en-provence , 1989), p. 228.
to tensions between captives.186 In particular, Jersey prisoners were critiqued for trading their bilingualism and acting as interpreters for the local authorities. Royal Navy Lieutenant O’Brien, voiced these tensions against Garree, a Jersey-born interpreter whom he considered as a ‘very scoundrel’ and ‘informer’, accusing him of denouncing a boatswain and gunner of his acquaintance to the commandant as they prepared their escape.187 Such fear of espionage led midshipmen like Hewson to socialise only within the circles of their captains at the depot.188
To conclude, this chapter has explored the ‘places’ of the British prisoners in a town turned into a parole depot. It highlighted the use of spaces, print and material cultures by prisoners used to ‘dwelling-in-travelling’. Whilst the local newspaper Le Narrateur described the depot as ‘a colony of captives’, the expression was more a metaphor than a tangible process.189 Verdun was polarised rather than metamorphosed by the socio-professional performances of the captives, who maintained, reinvented and challenged their ‘places’ abroad. In this respect, captivity was both reflexive and causal in illuminating tensions within British society, and the Navy and the Field Army in particular. However, one significant social sphere in this ‘motley assemblage’ remains neglected: that of the French and British women. The next chapter concerns these female influences on the prisoners’ living conditions and their parole status at Verdun.
186
This point will be discussed in greater depth in chapter 3. 187
Donat Henchy O’Brien, My Adventures in the Late War, Comprising a Narrative of Shipwreck, Captivity, Escapes from French prisons (2 vols, London, 1814), quoted in The Naval Chronicle, July-December 1812.
188
Equally, Forbes progressively restricted his society. See Forbes, Letters from France, II, p. 244. See also Hoffman, A Sailor of King George, p. 238.
189
As Fabien Théofilakis recently argued, writing an inter-gender history of military detention presents a methodological obstacle, for captivity appears as an essentially masculine space, ‘a state of radical deprivation, forbidding any female presence’.1 Yet, this initial tension dissipates as one begins to appreciate the constant presence of women in captivity, whether directly or indirectly. In the context of parole detention in Verdun, women were involved in many ways, and most remarkably in taking on the ambivalent role of voluntary captives. As victims of the Prairial decree or as dedicated spouses following their husbands, more than one hundred British women joined the depot and shared the fate of their captive kin, with their children and servants. Subject to a wavering tolerance from the French state, they played an active role in petitioning for ‘permissions’, and crossing the Channel despite the blockade to ensure family businesses and the transmission of letters.2 Whilst the presence of these female actors is virtually absent in conventional narratives of the conflict, their presence complicates the gendered definition of the prisoner of war. As this chapter argues, not only did they form a problematic group of captives at the depot, but the agency they displayed throws into relief the ambiguities of the dividing line between civil and military spheres in the totalisation of warfare during the period.3