Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France

7: Combat Companions & Veteran Bedfellows - Balzac’s Major Hulot and Colonel Chabert

chapter 7 Combat Companions & Veteran Bedfellows Balzac’s Major Hulot and Colonel Chabert Distinguished, wealthy, and handsome, the veteran had died a bachelor . An imperial count, military marshal, and royal peer of France, Marshal Hulot had served for more than forty years in the armies of the Revolution, Empire, Restoration, and July Monarchy. When he died in 1841, Hulot was honored with a grand state funeral in Paris. As the cortège wound its way through the streets of the capital, more than a few mourners must have remarked on what a shame it was that the old soldier had never married or fathered a family. Charming, vibrant, and virile to the end, the spry seventy-fiveyear -old Hulot possessed both a reputation and fortune that made him, even during the last years of his life, a most attractive and eligible bachelor. Having never wed, despite the attentions during his later years of an a√able woman half his age, Marshal Hulot had, in the eyes of most civilians, ended his life alone. But as the throngs of military mourners at his funeral made clear, Marshal Hulot ended his life as he had lived it, in the intimate company of soldier comrades and friends. Having su√ered the devastating loss of not only one but two of his most beloved companions during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars—Adjutant Gérard and Lieutenant Gudin—Hulot served in the armies of the Empire and lived out his retirement during the Restoration and July Monarchy in the company of his third companion, Sergeant Falcon. Following shortly after Napoleon’s state funeral in 1840, when the Emperor’s remains were ceremoniously repatriated to France and laid to rest under the dome of the Invalides in Paris, Hulot’s funeral in 1841 was attended by numerous o≈cers and veterans , who came to honor a man who had lived his entire life in the service of his fellow soldiers. Despite the outward appearance of his bachelor life, Marshal Hulot had neither lived nor died alone, but amid the constant and a√ectionate friendship of military companions. Balzac’s The Chouans (1829) Hulot appears first and most prominently in Balzac’s The Chouans, a historical novel that centers on the civil conflict between French Republican soldiers and Breton loyalist guerillas during the Revolution and Consulate in 1799. Devoutly royalist and Catholic, these counter-revolutionaries in Brittany were 174 restoration to second empire known as Chouans because of the way they imitated the hooting of an owl (chathuant or chouan in regional dialects) as a warning signal and battle cry.∞ First published as The Last Chouan or Brittany in 1800 (1829), Balzac’s novel was later published as The Chouans or Brittany in 1799 (1834) and finally as The Chouans (1845). In his preface to the 1845 edition, Balzac contextualizes the novel within the broader scope of The Human Comedy: ‘‘This work is my first, and its success has been slow in coming . . . Of several Scenes of Military Life that I am preparing, this is the only one that has been completed. It shows one side of civil war in the nineteenth century: that of the partisan.’’≤ The Chouans was thus the first novel that Balzac published sans pseudonym, the first of his Scenes of Military Life, and the first completed novel of The Human Comedy. Published a decade before Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) and over thirty years before Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), The Chouans e√ectively introduced the Napoleonic soldier to French realist fiction. In an attempt to emulate the historical novels of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, whom he admired, Balzac researched both published and eyewitness sources before beginning The Chouans. In May 1828, he read JeanJulien Savary’s La Guerre des Vendéens et des Chouans contre la République française (1824–27) and in September and October 1828, at the invitation of his veteran friend General Gilbert de Pommereul, Balzac spent several weeks at Fougères in Brittany, where he did further research on Breton geography and customs. As an historical novel, The Chouans builds on the military memories of Savary and Pommereul and thus creates a bridge between the genres of Napoleonic memoir and fiction. The son of General François de Pommereul (1745–1823), who served in the Royal Army of the Ancien Régime, General Gilbert de Pommereul (1774–1860) had been an o≈cer in the Revolutionary Army during the Chouan...