Chasseur à Pied of the Imperial Old Guard (NAP0173)

Chasseur à pied of the Old Guard: the twin regiment, and how to tell it apart

One man, standing, against nothing. This is a uniform study rather than a scene, and a uniform study makes a different kind of claim: it does not tell you what happened, it tells you what was true. Everything here is evidence — the bearskin, the epaulettes, the short sabre at the hip, the calfskin pack. And the single most important detail is something that is missing.

The bearskin has no plate on the front

A grenadier of the Guard wore a brass plate on the front of his bearskin. A chasseur wore the same cap without it. That absence, plus the cords the chasseurs did without, is how you identified one at a distance, and it mattered because these two regiments looked otherwise almost identical. Armies of this period built their recognition system out of very small differences, consistently applied.

Green is the colour of light infantry

The epaulettes are red with green centres, and the sabre knot is green. Across Europe the light infantry wore green — the colour of hunting, which is exactly what chasseur means. The Guard was a miniature of the whole army: it had its own line infantry, the grenadiers, and its own light infantry, these men, so that Napoleon could deploy a complete force without leaving the Guard behind.

The entry requirement was a few centimetres shorter

Both corps took veterans of several campaigns, but the grenadiers demanded the greater height and the chasseurs a little less, on the theory that light troops should be quicker on their feet. It reads as an absurd criterion and it was a real one, and the two corps were left to be jealous of each other on purpose: rivalry between elite units is cheap to maintain and hard to buy any other way.

The short sabre is almost useless, which is the point

That briquet at his side was a poor weapon — too short to fence with, too light to matter in a mêlée — and in the line infantry it was withdrawn from most men in 1807. It was kept by the elite companies and by the Guard, where it was used for cutting firewood and for being seen wearing. An object with no function that is issued anyway is telling you what the institution values.

What he is actually carrying is a house

The calfskin pack holds spare shoes, shirts, cleaning kit, three days of bread; the cartridge box holds fifty rounds; the musket and bayonet are nine pounds between them. This is a man equipped to walk to Moscow, and some of these men did. Related plates: NAP0027 for what the Guard was for, NAP0119 for how a man rose inside it.