Mémoires de Robert Guillemard, sergent en retraite, de 1805 à 1823, (1826)
- Paris, Mons
- Delaforest, Leroux
- 1826
- Tome premier
1826 saw the emergence of one of the first sets of military memoirs on the First Empire: the memoirs of Robert Guillemard, a retired sergeant.
Describing himself has the son of a notary from Six-Fours in southern France, conscripted in 1805, Robert Guillemard recounts the most noted episodes of a life that was already rich in adventures: he was on Redoutable at the Battle of Trafalgar, and allegedly fired upon the English officers of the Victory from the topmast, mortally wounding Nelson. Then, having become one of Admiral Villeneuve’s servants, he claimed to witness the latter Admiral’s death, which he described as an assassination. Afterwards, Guillemard was involved in a series of campaigns and escapades, in Spain and on the dreaded island of Cabrera, in Russia and Siberia, and allegedly was present at the execution of Murat in Naples, before leaving for Spain again in 1823, and then taking well-deserved retirement.
The memoirs were an immediate hit in France as well as in England and Germany (where they were introduced and commented on by Goethe himself), but they also raised many questions and much scepticism.
The English never believed that this was Nelson’s murderer; they had their own candidates crowned with the title of ‘avenger of Nelson’, who had sworn they had decimated every Frenchman perched on the foremast of Redoutable at the time.
The French seemed particularly interested in the death of Villeneuve, as rumours of a falsified suicide were in circulation, on the orders, or so it was said, of Napoleon himself… Unfortunately, the story told by Guillemard was so littered with errors and inaccuracies that the trick was revealed in 1828 in the Annales maritimes et coloniales. It seemed impossible actually to meet the retired sergeant, so impossible indeed, that nobody had ever met him!
The affair finally unravelled in 1830, again in the columns of the Annales maritimes et coloniales, when a certain Lardier, a former Navy accountant, who was quite unnerved by the impact of his false memoirs, admitted that ‘Guillemard was only an imaginary character, and his supposed memoires were a historical novel’.
Bibliographers think that Alexandre Lardier, who was himself the son of a notary near Six-Fours, a sailor under the Empire and thus knowledgeable about the world of the Navy, was either helped by or gave help to a lawyer, Charles-Ogé Barbaroux, also a Provençal, whom the Restoration had reduced to living by his pen.
