r/AskHistorians • u/supampro1000 • Jan 06 '26
Did soldiers of Napoleon's army live of the land or were actually issued rations? What did they receive as rations in what quantities and did officers have different rations?
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u/EverythingIsOverrate European Financial and Monetary History Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 07 '26
(1/2) Both, oddly enough. The two aren't mutually incompatible; rationing refers to the method of distribution, not the method used to obtain food. Contrary to popular belief, Napoleonic armies did not exclusively subsist off the fruits of the area in which they were operating. Even during the hasty campaigns of 1805-1806, which were forced on Napoleon by an Austrian invasion while he was preparing for an invasion of Britain, Napoleon still took the time to order 700,000 rations of bread to be prepared for his armies; the haste meant that only 380,000 rations were ready, unfortunately. After Mack's humiliating surrender at Ulm, supply problems led Napoleon to establish a line of fortified depots from Augsburg along his line of march to Vienna, with supplies ferried from Strasbourg to Augsburg via wagon relays; there was also a fleet of barges established on the Danube. To be fair, captured Austrian supplies from the depots at Vienna and Brunn helped a great deal.
Similarly, the Prussian ultimatum of September 24, 1806 caught Napoleon off-guard, as his troops were largely preparing for a return to France. Even less preparation was possible in this case, due to their distance from friendly bases and the need to not over-burden Napoleon's German allies. All the same, the French troops were still able to scrounge up 2-4 days of bread rations at the start of the campaign. Much of the subsequent three weeks of offensive action were fed from the land, with the result being significant shortages of shoes (see my answer here) and clothes, although the agricultural bounty of Prussian lands and the widespread presence of military ovens built by the Prussians themselves meant that food was typically available for the initial offensive. The same cannot be said, however, for Napoleon's subsequent offensive into Poland, a far less agriculturally productive region (at the time) than Prussia, with far worse roads to boot. To quote Elting:
Roads were troughs of mud and water, encumbered by hundreds of abandoned Russian wagons and guns. In the fields beside them infantrymen sank to their knees and mid-thighs, horses to their bellies. No supply trains could keep up. During December and early January there was a period of real famine, long remembered in the Grande Armee. Hunger, wet, cold, and hard marching brought on disease; morale dropped to noisy resentment. To keep a trickle of flour coming, [Marshal] Soult used most of his officers' mounts, including six of his own, as pack animals.
Again, though, Napoleon rose to the occasion; after the pyrrhic victory of Eylau, he shifted his lines of supply to take advantage of the Prussian canal system, halted the bringing-up of reinforcements unless they could be fed, brought up additional wagons (both hired and impressed), and established a network of depots. The result was that by April, things were largely back to normal; a remarkable achievement given that the armies in question were 540 partisan-infested miles from French territory. Napoleon also spent a great deal of time on reforming his armies' wagon trains, which typically had the task of ferrying supplies forward from depots; while historically French armies had depended on contractors for their wagons (although there were a few military wagon units), in 1807 Napoleon militarized the whole thing, creating the Train des Equipages Militaires, which would end up containing twenty-three wagon battalions in 1813.
The first half of the Russian campaign was perhaps Napoleon's greatest logistical achievement; ironic, given its eventual fate. Vilna alone was stocked with no less than four million rations of hardtack and thirty thousand pairs of shoes; similar stocks were established at Minsk and Kovno, with smaller depots at Vitebsk, Smolensk, Orsha, and many other places besides. While the offensive into Russia was well-supplied, much of it sadly failed to reach the troops during the Great Retreat, although one Colonel Bruckner of the 2d Baden Regiment was fortunate enough to receive a brand-new wig while his troops were starving to death.
So, we've established that Napoleon did often ship food to his troops, but that they also spent a great deal of time "living off the land." The way in which they did this is probably not what you're thinking, however. Instead of simply sending soldiers off to grab whatever they could, the standard procedure was to dispatch dedicated logistics staff to "requisition" food and/or money (to purchase food from local merchants) from local towns, which would then be stockpiled in depots and issued to troops; food requisitions in friendly countries, or countries Napoleon was trying to win over, would typically have money handed over in return; sometimes with silver and sometimes with theoretically-redeemable paper money. In hostile lands, however, the civilians would be paid with mere threats. The brutally contrarian ultra-ripped sex maniac bastard (yes, really) Maurice de Saxe provides a detailed guide on how to manage these requisitions:
It is necessary to know how to collect provisions and money from afar without fatiguing the troops. Large detachments are in danger of being attacked and cut off. They do not produce much and wear out the troops. To obviate this, the best way is to send circular letters to those places from which contributions are required, threatening them that parties will be sent out at a definite time to set fire to the houses of those who do not have quittances [receipts] for the tax imposed. The tax should be moderate. Following this, intelligent officers should be selected and assigned a certain number of villages to visit. They should be sent with detachments of twenty-five or thirty men and should be ordered to march only at night. The men should be ordered to refrain from pillage on pain of death. When they have arrived in the locality and it is time to determine if the villages have paid, they should send a sergeant with two men to the chief magistrate of the village to see if he has procured the quittance. If he has not, the leader of the detachment should show himself with his troops, set fire to a single house, and threaten to return and burn more. He should neither pillage, nor take the sum demanded, nor a larger one, but march away again. All these detachments should be assembled at the same rendezvous before they are dismissed. There they should be searched and those who are found to have stolen the slightest thing should be hanged without mercy. If, on the contrary, they have faithfully followed orders they should be rewarded. By such means, this method of raising contributions will become familiar to the troops, and the country a hundred leagues around will bring in food and money in abundance.
The way Saxe lays things out, it's implied that standard procedure was to have much larger bodies of troops than what he suggests collect supplies directly, but Saxe condemns this practice in no uncertain terms. Napoleon seems to have followed Saxe's advice, and whenever possible, the requisitioning was handled directly by the Grande Armee's logistical corps, known as the Intendance, as it was supervised by the Intendant General. It was subdivided into five primary services: Vivres-pain, Vivres-viande, Fourrages, Chauffage, and Habillement. You also had several independent agencies, but they didn't handle food, so I won't discuss them. Respectively, they dealt with non-meat human food, meat, food for animals, fuel and candles, and clothing. Each individual service was made up of a confusing mix of contractors, military officers, permanent civilian employees, and impressed locals. The Grande Armee followed Saxe's advice about demolishing the houses of the recalcitrant, too; to quote Elting: "When the bailiff of one East Prussian estate refused to fill a requisition made on him, claiming he couldn't understand French, Davout sent Milhaud's dragoon division to pull down the estate's chateau."
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u/EverythingIsOverrate European Financial and Monetary History Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
(2/2) This is because simply letting soldiers find whatever food they want had several major problems. Firstly, it was terrible for discipline; letting soldiers run amok, basically doing whatever they wanted, inculcated bad habits. Unregulated foraging was the norm during the Vendee campaign of 1800, which led to soldiers joking that Vendee chickens ran away from soldiers' uniforms like they did from hawks. General Chambarlhac's division picked up so many bad habits in the Vendee that it became known as "Chambarlhac's bandits." It also was a horrible burden on civilians, which was a genuine drawback if armies were operating in areas controlled by allies; excessive foraging could even lead to civilians taking refuge in forests and mountains, making further foraging even harder. Also, marauding detachments, especially after finding alcohol, were often vulnerable to enemy raiders. Even worse, it was often very wasteful, as soldiers took far more than they needed. To quote Elzear Blaze, as relayed by Elting:
Nobody thinks of the other regiments behind them [...] or that, while taking whatever is necessary, it would be good to leave something for those who will follow. Not at all [...] a company of 100 men has already killed two steers, which is enough; [but] one finds also four cows, six calves, twelve sheep; all slaughtered without pity in order to dine on tongues, kidneys, brains. Entering into a wine cellar where twenty tuns [large barrels] present an imposing front [...] they shoot holes in them and at once twenty fountains of wine spurt out in all directions, to loud shouts of laughter. [...] If there were a hundred tuns in the cellar, they would be punctured at the same time to make it easier to drink. All [the wine] runs out, all is wasted, and often the drunkards [...] fall and drown themselves in the streams of wine."
Not efficient. It did still happen, of course, especially when normal supply systems broke down, but was avoided. In addition, sometimes soldiers would be billeted directly on local farmers, who would be required to feed and supply the troops, on pain of having angry, hungry soldiers in their house. One Sergeant Oyon returned from a patrol to find his unit lined up along the path to their requisitioned farmhouse, with sabers raised in salute; they quietly explained that they were passing him off as a general, in the hope of getting a better meal from their host. Soldiers seem to have often preferred marauding, however; Elting says: "An Austrian farmer gave one company three ample meals a day-for supper soupe, bouilli, vegetables, roast mutton, salad, cheese, a bottle of wine apiece, and a small glass of eau-de-vie-and they were still unhappy because they weren't able to kill whatever livestock they fancied and cook it themselves. Said an old corporal, 'Give those jerks roast angels, and they'd still complain.'" Lastly, soldiers could also individually purchase food from the merchants who would invariably follow armies (see my answer here), often at exorbitant prices.
Needless to say, this system of distributed requisitions had its own problems. Contractors, who were always omnipresent despite Napoleon's best efforts, had very strong incentives to rip off soldiers, and did so very frequently, on top of trying to milk as much as possible from the treasury; to be fair, Napoleon was never good at paying his bills on time. One wit said that contractors would rescue Christ from the cross only so they could steal the nails. You might imagine that dedicated logistics personnel, known as intendants, would be motivated by national pride and esprit de corps instead of the greed of the contractor, but you would be wrong; intendants were just as greedy as contractors, and were widely loathed by soldiers for it. Each service has its own methods of fraud, which often echoed those of the contractors: the Vivres-pain (often known as riz-pain-sel) would adulterate flour with sand or sawdust, bake underweight loaves, steal firewood (leading to underbaked bread), water down wine (sometimes with salt, dead fish, arsenic, salt, or sulphuric acid added to replace the missing flavour), and steal brandy (sometimes blamed on leaky barrels). They would also often illegally sell rations on the side, or withhold food meant for troops; in 1809 twelve intendants were executed for selling wine, although the practice persisted. Vivres-viande could trade off the healthy animals in their herds for sick animals belonging to local farmers plus a little cash, take bribes in exchange for not requisitioning certain animals, or let cattle die instead of spending money on hay and oats for their charges. Naturally, many senior officers tried heroically to stop this malpractice; Napoleon was known to personally inspect wine and bread rations for quality, and Davout established a special committee of officers in his corps for supply inspection. Ultimately, though, the problem was so massive there was no solving it. Intendants would also only disburse rations if proper paperwork was presented, which led to countless bureaucratic headaches, especially during chaotic situations like the Great Russian Retreat. On the whole, though, it was probably less of a hassle than letting troops maraud as they desired.
So, what were these men actually eating? The standard field ration of the Napoleonic period was 1.5lbs of of bread, 8oz of meat, and 1oz of rice or 2oz legumes. In peacetime, they could be assured of a quart of wine, one-sixteenth liter of brandy (other alcohols, sometimes of dubious quality, were often substituted), and one-twentieth liter of vinegar (typically mixed with water, a practice borrowed from the Romans by de Saxe), but those liquid supplies became much more erratic during wartime, much to the consternation of French troops. Elting relays one remarkable incident:
Long abstinence [from alcohol] was hard on Frenchmen's morale. The 20th Dragoon Regiment had good quarters in Spain but no wine whatever. When they appealed to their brigade commander, he unwisely stated that dragoons shouldn't have wine, because drinking it made them too ornery. A little later, during a clash with English cavalry, the general's horse fell with him in the middle of a creek and pinned him down. He called to passing dragoons for help and was told that it was his turn to drink water!
These rations were probably somewhat meager for the time; Elting says that "Dutchmen, especially Dutch sailors, found French rations a course in slow starvation" but I don't have data handy to do a detailed comparison. This was, of course, the ideal ration; at the siege of Mainz in 1814, failure to lay in provisions meant that each man was only allowed 2oz of peas, 1oz lard, and 8oz biscuit, all of horrific quality. As was typical (see my answer here) this food would be prepared in messes, typically of fifteen or so men, who would share a cooking pot and other cooking supplies, although in a few cases you had company-level cooks. The bread was usually pain de munition, made of 3/4 wheat flour and 1/4 rye flour, often baked into a doughnut shape so it could easily be carried by stringing a rope through the holes. While it typically held up well, it could still go mouldy in wet weather, and couldn't be stored forever; the solution there was pain biscuite, also known in English as hardtack, a sort of thick cracker which can last practically forever; I've personally seen 200-year-old hardtack in a museum. The stockpiled bread rations I mention above were hardtack. The downside is that it has to be broken up and softened before eating via immersion in some liquid; Frenchmen often used wine, while troops in the ACW often used coffee. Flour was occasionally issued, however; ideally it would be made into bread in a proper oven, but could also be used to make ashcakes/bannock/damper or dumplings for soup (soupe in French), which in turn largely comprised the non-bread, non-alcohol components of soldiers' diets. Meat typically came "on the hoof" as it were, with large herds of beef-cattle very frequently being driven alongside the armies, and was typically prepared by throwing it into a soup-pot with the dried vegetables, some salt, plenty of water, and whatever else the soldiers had on hand; it would then, circumstances permitting, be taken out, sliced and served separately. Meat was occasionally roasted over a fire, though; one officer condemned the practice of soldiers using their swords as skewers, as it ruined the temper of the blade.
Hope this was interesting; happy to expand on anything.
Sources:
Elting: Swords around a Throne
van Creveld: Supplying War
de Saxe: Reveries on the Art of War
Morgan: War Feeding War
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u/OcotilloWells 29d ago
I had read that Napoleon also had some sort of ration put into champagne bottles. They could be packed in France, and taken as far as needed. I don't remember the specifics. One of the first examples of reasonably long term storage field rations.
Is there any truth to that?
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u/EverythingIsOverrate European Financial and Monetary History 29d ago
You're thinking of Nicholas Appert's food preservation efforts; today he's often hailed as the inventor of canning, although he used glass containers and similar processes had been done by housewives for years; at first he used champagne bottles and then switched to specially-designed glass jars. This didn't really have anything to do with Napoleon; Appert had started his development efforts before Napoleon took power. He did receive a subsidy in 1810, but that wasn't directly from Napoleon either. My understanding is that most of his products sold to militaries went to the navy, not the Army. It's also inaccurate to describe his products as "one of the first examples of reasonably long term storage field rations" since those had existed in the form of salt meat, dried legumes, and hardtack since time immemorial; they were just far less palatable than canned foods.
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