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Storytelling, fairytales and autobiography: some

observations on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
French soldiers’ and sailors’ memoirs
a
David Hopkin
a
University of Glasgow
Published online: 04 Jun 2010.
To cite this article: David Hopkin (2004) Storytelling, fairytales and autobiography: some observations on
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French soldiers’ and sailors’ memoirs, Social History, 29:2, 186-198, DOI:
10.1080/0307102042000207840
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Social History Vol. 29 No. 2 May 2004
David M. Hopkin
Storytelling, fairytales and

autobiography: some observations on
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
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French soldiers’ and sailors’ memoirs1

‘The poor are silent,’ wrote Daniel Roche in his introduction to the Journal of the Parisian
glazier and sans-culotte Jacques-Louis Ménétra (1738–1812), one of few unforced personal
testimonies we have from a member of the French popular classes of the eighteenth century.
Silent, that is, for historians, because everything we know about early modern cities suggests
that they were, on the contrary, noisy places, their inhabitants voluble, sometimes raucous.
Agriculture lent itself less well to conversation, but in rural areas too neighbourly sociability
during particular seasons ensured a thriving interchange of rumours, gossip, insults, challenges,
jokes and laments. For all his literary knowledge, every page of Ménétra’s Journal shows traces
of this oral culture, not least in the phonetic spelling (a deliberate choice, according to Roche).2
Long before he was a writer Ménétra was, as Robert Darnton argues in his preface to the
English edition of the Journal, a storyteller.3 His memoirs include occasions on which he
entertained his colleagues and acquaintances with spicy anecdotes of his amorous exploits. His
nickname among his fellow journeymen, ‘the welcome Parisian’, is indicative of the enhanced
status such narrative talent earned him in this world of youthful male sociability. But Ménétra
was also a teller of stories in the colloquial sense of the term, in that he was frequently
‘economical with the truth’. To construct his memoirs he drew on a fund of popular motifs
concerning social bandits, prodigal sons, nubile nuns and bawdy matrons, some of which he
acquired from the cheap street literature of the time, but much of which also belonged to oral
popular culture. It is unlikely that Ménétra only had recourse to these motifs in his written
work; they were already part of his storytelling repertoire (or as Darnton puts it, his Journal is
an extension of his ‘bull sessions’). We can reasonably deduce from Ménétra’s example that the
communicative processes of the early modern artisan included recognizable genres of what
folklorists call ‘oral literature’, such as folktales, legends, jokes and proverbs.
1The research for this article was made possible 2 Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal of My Life, ed.
through a European Fellowship from the Royal Daniel Roche, intro. Robert Darnton (New York,
Society of Edinburgh/Caledonian Research Fund, 1986), 1, 5.
and I am grateful to these institutions. 3 ibid., ix–x.
Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN 1470-1200 online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0307102042000207840
May 2004 Storytelling, fairytales and autobiography 187

Ménétra was not the only popular memoirist to recall storytelling occasions in his own life:
in the autobiographies of French soldiers and sailors (probably the occupational groups who
have left us the most testimonies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) such invoca-
tions are fairly common. For example, the Norman cabin boy Letellier, who wrote an
account of his first two ‘campaigns’ on the grand banks of Newfoundland in 1876 and 1877,
had been inspired to go to sea by the tales told by old sailors working on his family’s farm.
Once on board he found he had to tell stories as a way of taming his otherwise brutal
shipmates. His fund of tales was a form of cultural capital with which to buy his entry into the
crew.4 Jean-Marie Déguignet, veteran of the Crimea, Italy, Algeria and Mexico, became a
storyteller while convalescing in the military hospital at Aix: ‘Every evening, once in bed, they
called out from every corner of the room “Come on corporal! Finish yesterday evening’s
story.”’ A selection of these tales, most of which he had originally learnt from a neighbouring
weaver in his childhood, is scattered through his voluminous Story of My Life.5 No such
interruptions feature in Nicolas Page’s sober account of his capture and subsequent escape
from Spanish guerrillas during the Peninsular campaign, but the frequent recurrence of the
introduction ‘Il est bon de vous dire que . . .’ is a sign that the author had, at the very least,
picked up the language of fairytales.6 This phrase, according to the folklorist Paul Delarue, was
one of the clichés of the ‘barracks style’ adopted by soldier-storytellers.7 Delarue recognized it
from his own experience of military storytelling during his national service at the end of the
nineteenth century.8
Contemporary witnesses to military and naval life confirm sailors’ and soldiers’ penchant for
storytelling. An account written by a French officer in the 1830s described how, for a couple
of glasses of schnapps, a soldier-storyteller entertained his dormitory with the famous tale of
‘Jean of the Bear’.9 The naval author Auguste Jal considered the sailor-storyteller’s role on board
ship so vital that he gave him his own entry in his nautical dictionary; without this distraction
what damage might bored sailors do on a becalmed ship?10 While ‘Mother Goose’ has remained
the ideal figure of the storyteller, folktale collectors following the Grimms’ pioneering trail
discovered that male migrant work communities were good locations to discover informants.
Not only ships and barracks but artisan workshops, lumberjack cabins, farm bothies and prisons
have all proved to be nurseries of narrative talent. Storytelling requires an audience, and these
locations all brought large numbers of men together and forced them to live in intimacy with
each other. The long periods of enforced idleness associated with such environments turned
storytelling into a valued activity. It was here that established storytellers developed their skills,
4 Anon., Sur le Grand-Banc: Pêcheurs de Terre- 7 Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Ténèze, Le
Neuve. Récit d’un ancien pêcheur (Saint-Malo, 1999; Conte populaire français: catalogue raisonné des versions
reprint of the 1896 edn), 6, 23. Although the de France (Paris, new edn 2002), vol. I, 246.
memoir was published anonymously, the original 8 Paul Delarue, L’Amour des trois oranges et autres
editor Paul Desjardins identified the author as contes folkloriques des provinces de France (Paris, 1947),
‘Letellier’. 7.
5 Jean-Marie Déguignet, Histoire de ma vie: 9 J. Delmart and Léon Vidal (pseud. Léon de
L’intégrale des mémoires d’un paysan bas-breton (Ergué- Céran), La Caserne: moeurs militaires (Brussels, 1833),
Gabéric, 2001), 45–76, 304. 141.
6 Nicolas Page, Nicolas de Belrupt: entre Wagram et 10 Auguste Jal, Glossaire nautique: Répertoire poly-
Waterloo, souvenirs d’Espagne du caporal Nicolas Page, gote des termes de marine anciens et modernes (Paris,
ed. Marie-Françoise Michel and Jean-François 1848), 507.
Michel (Monthureux-sur-Saône, 1997), 46, 56.
188 Social History vol. 29 : no. 2

while novices could observe their craft and acquire a repertoire.11 To
highlight just one example
of the talent nurtured in the dormitory, it was during his military service in the 1840s that a
Flemish soldier learnt the tale of ‘The King of Picardy and his Eighteen Children’, which fills
150 printed pages and was originally told over several nights.12
Storytelling flourished in barracks and forecastles; but what significance did it have in the
lives of the men who told or heard these tales? The purpose of this article is to propose some
answers to this question, by tracing the influence of oral storytelling on French military and
naval memoirists. Their use of folktale motifs to construct their own narratives suggests that
storytelling was a means by which soldiers and sailors made sense of their experiences, expressed
their understanding to others and devised strategies to cope with the circumstances of their lives.
In her study of workers’ autobiographies, Mary Jo Maynes has already drawn attention to
how these plebeian writers drew on ‘formal models and patterns of language drawn from such
genres as picaresque, fairy tales and sermons’. But, she argues, although their imagery is
sometimes invoked, fairytales ‘do not seem to have influenced plotting in the same essential
way that picaresque narrative has’.13 Her working-class narratives of suffering are too relentlessly
realistic to accommodate the fantasy which is the core of the fairytale genre. The picaresque
was a much more useful narrative convention for those, such as journeymen, who made their
lives on the road. Its anti-heroic style also expressed the powerlessness of those caught up in
the flux of history, which for many of these politically committed writers was their essential
message: only through union might they succeed in changing their position. Soldiers and sailors
memoirs are, if anything, more markedly picaresque in style. Given the chancy fortunes and
misfortunes of war and navigation, no other genre would serve for their wanderings. Even
those soldier and sailor autobiographies which partake of another genre identified by Maynes
– ‘success stories and upward climbs’ – often imply that promotion was achieved, and wealth
acquired, as much by luck as judgement, while for others the narrative of their service years
was simply a litany of miseries endured.14 Moreover, while such autobiographers were obvi-
ously among the fortunate few in that they were survivors, not all felt that their lives had the
happy ending demanded by a fairytale. Those written for publication were often undisguised
pleas for charity; those who wrote for their own posterity sometimes explicitly stated that their
purpose was to explain themselves to children who had not understood them.15 And yet,
although direct allusions to fairytale motifs and characters might be rare, one can detect their
imprint on these narratives, and in some cases their memoirs would remain opaque to the
modern reader without recourse to the folklorist’s tools, the motif and tale-type indexes.
11 Linda Dégh, Folktales and Society: Storytelling in (Brussels, 1969), 73.
a Hungarian Peasant Community (Bloomington, 15 For example, Jean-Claude Vaxelaire addressed
Indiana, new edn 1989), 81–93. his eldest son thus in the foreword to his memoirs
12 Maurits de Meyer, Le Conte populaire flamand: of military service between 1792 and 1801: ‘Il arrive
Catalogue analytique, Folklore Fellows Communica- assez souvent qu’un père de famille a beaucoup
tions 203 (Helsinki, 1968), 8. travaillé, beaucoup économisé, fait beaucoup de
13 Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life voyages ou de campagnes au péril de sa vie, pour
Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies amasser quelque chose à ses enfants, et que ces
in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill, N.C., enfants ingrats, faute de prévoyance, le dissipent en
1995), 34–7. peu de temps. Je m’imagine que s’ils voyaient son
14 For example, the first chapter of the Napo- histoire, ils l’apprécieraient et agiraient tout autre-
leonic Flemish cavalryman Jef Abbeel’s memoirs is ment’: Mémoires d’un Vétéran de l’ancienne armée
headed ‘Début des misères’: L’Odyssée d’un carabinier (1791–1800), ed. H. Gauthier-Villars (Paris, 1892), x.
à cheval, 1806–1815, ed. Général René H. Willems

Let us take, for example, the Journal (not in fact a diary but a reconstruction from memory)
written by Georges Bangofsky (1777–1837), son of a button-maker turned linen-merchant from
Sarreguemines in germanophone Lorraine. Like so many popular autobiographers, whose
papers were originally destined to be read only by their family, Bangofsky did not bother with
information about his everyday civilian life: he limited his account to what he considered to
be his ‘grandes heures’, his years as a hussar in Napoleon’s army between 1797 and 1814. But
while it was his participation in such great events as the retreat from Russia and the battles of
Jena and Leipzig which moved him to leave a record of his life, the actual events recounted
tend to be much more personal – the accidental relationships thrown up by war.The encounter
below, for instance, took place shortly after the capture of Ratisbon in 1809, a particularly
bloody affair:
The 8th of May, at Carlsbach, following a path on foot, I went into a cabin to light my
pipe and there found an extremely upset woman. She told me that her father had died
eight days ago; he was there, lying on the straw, covered by a poor piece of cloth, and he
already smelt strongly. She said that the parish priest had refused to bury him because she
didn’t have any money [to pay for the service] at the moment. I advised her to get her
neighbours to bury him, but she believed that unless he was lain in a churchyard his soul
would be damned. I gave this poor woman the two florins required, and went away
quickly, cursing this vile race of pitiless German priests who only look for ways to rob the
unfortunate.16
Although Bangofsky’s anecdote is not beyond the bounds of possibility, one might still
wonder why, out of all the adventures he had undergone and scenes he had witnessed in sixteen
years of active service, he retained such a detailed memory of this minor incident, and felt it
necessary to include it in his short Journal. The answer probably lies in a story that Bangofsky
almost certainly knew, for it was extremely popular with his contemporaries as an oral folktale,
a chapbook, a popular image and a vaudeville play – Jean de Calais (tale-type 506).17 Jean de
Calais was the son of a rich merchant entrusted by his father with a cargo for a distant land.
He successfully sold his merchandise, but on his return to his ship he passed a corpse by the
side of the road. When he asked why it was not buried he was told that it was the custom in
that country for a man to remain unburied until his debts were paid. Jean used his profits to
pay the debts, and so returned empty-handed to his father. But this good deed did not go
unrewarded for when, on a subsequent voyage, Jean was pushed overboard by a rival, the spirit
of the dead man rescued him from the seas.
Jean de Calais is a rare example in the folk canon of a hero drawn from the urban, mercantile
class. The story is, therefore, likely to have had a special resonance for Bangofsky, who shared
this background and who, like Jean, was far from home at the time (and who, it should be
admitted, considered his campaigns as opportunities to enrich himself ). The influence of the
tale on Bangofsky’s memory is particularly noticeable at the end of his anecdote, where he
highlighted the foreign and dastardly practices of German priests, just as Jean de Calais was
16 Georges Bangofsky, Les Étapes de Georges Ban- (Mt.506A) en France: Tradition écrite, tradition
gofsky, officier lorrain; fragments de son journal de cam- orale, imagerie’ in Wayland D. Hand and Gustave
pagnes (1797–1815), ed. Alexandre de Roche du O. Arlt (eds), Humaniora: Essays in Literature, Folk-
Teilloy (Nancy-Paris, 1905), 51. lore, Bibliography: Honoring Archer Taylor on his Seven-
17 Marie-Louise Tenèze, ‘Jean de Calais tieth Birthday (Locust Valley, N.Y., 1960), 286–308.

confronted with strange customs on his voyage. By putting on the mantle of Jean de Calais
Bangofsky was able to assert his own French identity, which was otherwise not obvious to
everyone he met. Bangofsky’s ancestry was Polish, his father had been born in Germany, his
mother-tongue was German, his regiment was largely recruited from among germanophone
French nationals, and he was, on several occasions when threatened by vengeful German
peasants, able to pass himself off as a Bavarian hussar. For German-speaking Lorrainers like
Bangofsky, proud of their contribution to France’s national glory through feats of arms, it was
important to assert, as far as possible, a clear cultural difference between themselves and those
they identified as ‘German’. And for Lorrainers the two key German characteristics were being
priest-ridden and credulous.
Jean de Calais provided Bangofsky with a role-model. The hussar was particularly fond of
rescuing damsels in distress, financial or otherwise, as does Jean in other episodes of his tale.
Maybe the memory of Jean’s virtuous action prompted Bangofsky to act in a similar way, or
maybe it was simply a narrative device somehow to make concrete his own worth. Much of
his Journal is taken up with murderous encounters, violence towards prisoners and marauding.
The day before he had witnessed (perhaps taken part in) the burning of the military hospital
at Ebersberg in which, he claimed, 3000 Austrian soldiers lost their lives. While by no means
apologetic, he may have felt the need to redress the balance somewhat. Whether the events of
8 May 1809 happened exactly as related or not, Bangofsky portrayed himself as performing
similar actions to the most famous mercantile hero in all French popular culture, and could
claim some of that heroism for himself.
The life of Jean-Roch Coignet, grenadier, sergeant and finally officer of Napoleon’s Imperial
Guard, as recounted in his Cahiers, at times resembled a fairytale, in particular during his
childhood. The cruelties he and his siblings suffered at the hands of his stepmother, and the
parental abandonment of his younger brother and sister in a forest, cannot help but recall to
the reader’s mind such tales as Petit Poucet and Hansel and Gretel. Using Coignet’s experiences
as an example, Eugen Weber has argued that horrific fairytale motifs such as the wicked
stepmother, which modern readers take for fantasies, were really little more than descriptions
of eighteenth-century peasant realities (and consequently the psychoanalytic interpretations of
fairytales so much in vogue should be abandoned in favour of historical explanations).18 But
Coignet also liked to tell tales, he mixed fiction and fact in his account and took folkloric motifs
to fashion his memoirs.19 Life experiences such as child-abandonment may help explain the
motifs of the fairytale, but for Coignet the tales he knew provided the narrative structure for
his own experiences. The imprint of an oral culture is likely to be especially marked on an
autobiographer who only learnt to read and write at the age of thirty-three.
An example of Coignet’s use of fairytale motifs occurs during his account of his promotion
to sergeant in 1809, when he was invited to a dinner party by his captain. For Coignet, the
sole common soldier in the company of officers and members of the Parisian bourgeoisie, the
18 Eugen Weber, ‘Fairies and hard facts: the in his wooing of Brunhilde on behalf of Hagen.
reality of folktales’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XLII Coignet was presumably unfamiliar with the Nibe-
(1981), 93–113. lungenlied, but the idea of a hero wooing and
19 One of the more obvious being his assertion winning a princess on behalf of his lord was cer-
that General Bujeaud, sent by Napoleon to fetch tainly alive in the popular culture of the period (and
the future empress Marie-Louise from Vienna, was figures in fairytales, such as tale-type 531).
obliged to sleep with her first, just as Siegfried had

evening tested his limited knowledge of etiquette and small talk. He was intimidated by the
women of Paris in their finery, but none the less found himself stuck at table between two such
beautiful ladies ‘who were not at all annoyed to be seated at some distance from their husbands’.
At one point, when the conversation turned to the services he had done his officer, Coignet
found himself blushing and, taking his fine napkin, he wiped his face. Then, mistaking it for
his handkerchief, he put it in his pocket – but he had been observed by the daughter of his
host and at the moment when Coignet came to make his goodbyes she denounced him to her
father. Coignet escaped any consequences, however, with a joke about believing he was still in
enemy territory (his ability to sniff out peasants’ caches of food being his major asset in the
eyes of his captain).The next day he received a letter from one of these beautiful married ladies,
and for a short (and, for Coignet, embarrassing) period he became her lover.20
This incident is very reminiscent of a key motif in the tale of The Three Snake Leaves (tale-
type 612), and in particular the version told by the mason Hervé Colcanab of Plouaret to the
folklorist François Luzel in 1869. Goulven, son of a seigneur, marries his mother’s servant who
subsequently runs off with an army officer (all six versions of this tale collected in France have
a military setting). The distraught Goulven takes a position as a common soldier in his rival’s
regiment, is taken under the wing of his officer and promoted to become his secretary. There
he is spotted by his runaway spouse. She plots with her lover to undo her husband. Goulven
is invited to dinner (and in many versions of the story, this invitation is, like Coignet’s, a
recognition of a recent promotion). Goulven, like Coignet, initially refuses the invitation,
because he feels uncomfortable mixing with his officers (the social gap so obvious to Coignet
was also a major theme in folktales), but is finally persuaded. At the dinner he is suddenly
brought face to face with his wife, and her unexpected presence brings the blood rushing to
his head. While momentarily overcome a servant slips a silver spoon into his pocket (in other
versions a napkin is added). At the end of the dinner the spoon’s theft is announced, the guests
are searched, the spoon is found on Goulven and he is condemned as a thief and sentenced to
death. With the help of a comrade, and some magic herbs, the soldier escapes, rescues and
marries a princess, and from his new position as prince enacts a terrible revenge on his first
wife and his commander.21
At the time of his dinner party Coignet was unmarried – and his relations with his officers
were, at least as he remembered them nearly half a century later, almost always affectionate and
respectful – so the parallels between the tale and the autobiography are far from exact. However,
the fairytale motif does capture the social confusion Coignet felt, and also serves as an
introduction to the adultery in which he was about to become engaged (when desire quickly
gave way to guilt and shame). Coignet was seldom at ease with the opposite sex, and on more
than one occasion literally did not know where to put himself when confronted by women;
his memoirs lack entirely the erotic adventures boasted about by Ménétra and hinted at by
Bangofsky. The napkin incident is thus a way of expressing his fears and doubts about the
fashionable ladies with whom he had briefly mixed: they were potential betrayers, just as
Goulven’s wife proved to be.
20 Jean-Roch Coignet, Les Cahiers du Capitaine Basse-Bretagne (Paris, 1881), vol. II, 309–25: Le Soldat
Coignet, ed. Jean Mistler (Paris, 1968), 235–6. qui délivra une princesse de l’enfer.
21 François-Marie Luzel, Légendes chrétiennes de la

A contemporary of Bangofsky’s and Coignet’s, the Breton weaver Jean Conan (1765–1834)
also made use of folkloric motifs in constructing his Avanturio. The existence of Conan’s
manuscript autobiography, written in 7054 rhyming couplets towards the end of his life, has
long been known to specialists of Breton literature, but only to the wider public when a French
translation was published in 1990.22 As was the case with Bangofsky, Conan only related those
events in his life that he felt might interest ‘my dear reader’: his traumatic voyage on a cod-
fishing brig to Newfoundland in 1788, and his years in the revolutionary army during which
time he took part in the storming of the Tuileries (which led to the fall of the French
monarchy), the campaigns in the Palatinate and Flanders between 1792 and 1794 which saved
the young republic and, after being invalided out of the line, the vicious civil war between
‘bleus’ and chouans in his native Brittany.
In the winter of 1792, while quartered at Bingen on the Rhine, Conan was on guard when
he:
had an adventure which deserves to be written down. At midnight I was sent as lone sentry
into a wood within musket-shot of the Rhine; it was pitch black; my orders were to open
fire without warning if I saw anyone coming from the Rhine towards me; marching –
walking – moving even was forbidden, because the place was extremely dangerous: nine
or ten men had already been killed there during their watch; only the bravest soldiers were
sent there. I had been there for about three-quarters of an hour when I thought I heard
footsteps towards the river; I leaned in that direction to try and see, but there was neither
moon nor stars; at that moment I felt that my eyes were not large enough, because I had
no desire to die at that spot. In the end I saw coming slowly in my direction, like a monster
or phantom, something that resembled the Evil One; he was as big as a barrel, and very
tall: I could not conceive that it was a human being. From time to time it stopped to
listen, my eyes never left it for a moment. Finally I said to myself: ‘I’m a soldier on guard-
duty, and I’m armed; evil spirits can have no hold on me! I cannot stay here and wait for
it, I’ll advance directly towards him and attempt to lay him low, if at least it is human.’ My
bayonet was in place, my musket loaded; like a roaring lion I ran at it and put my bayonet
to its stomach; I was ready to ram it home and cut it in two: I said to it ‘Speak, if you are
of God’s creation; if not then your life is over.’23
This adventure had consequences for Conan, as will be revealed, but first I would like to
suggest that this story has a close connection to another fairytale, in this case tale-type 569 The
Knapsack, the Hat and the Horn. This was how it was told to the folklorist Emmanuel Cosquin
by a young man from the village of Montiers-sur-Saulx (Meuse) in 1867–8.
The colonel said one day to Plume-Patte [the eldest of three soldier brothers] to go on
guard at midnight in a tower haunted by spirits: all those who had gone there on guard
for the last ten years had been found dead. When Plume-Patte was in the tower he heard
22Jean Conan, Avanturio ar Citoien Jean Conan a 1990). A prose translation by Paolig Combot, and
Voengamb: Les Aventures du citoyen Jean Conan de introduced by Mona Sohier-Ozouf, appeared later
Guincamp, ed. and trans. Bernard Cabon, Jean- and it is this edition that I quote from: Les Aventures
Christophe Cassard, Paolig Combot, Joël Cornette, extraordinaires du citoyen Conan (Morlaix, 2001).
Francis Favereau, Jean-René Le Queau, Fanch 23 ibid., 138–9.
Perou,Yann-Ber Piriou and Pierre Salaun (Morlaix,


a noise of chains being dragged; to start with he was scared, but he took hold of himself
immediately and cried out: ‘Who goes there?’ No one answered. ‘If you do not answer I
will blow your brains out.’ ‘Ah!’ said the man who dragged the chains, ‘you were fortunate
enough to perform your duty correctly! If you hadn’t, what happened to the others would
have happened to you. Now, here is a purse, the more you take money out of it, the more
you’ll have.’ Plume-Patte said ‘Put it at the foot of my sentry-box, I’ll take it at the end
of my watch.’ His watch over, he picked up the purse.24
Cosquin’s informant had brought this tale back ‘in his knapsack’ from his army service, and this
tale-type was a particular military favourite. The Grimms’ version, which gives this tale-type
its title, was told to them (in exchange for some old clothes) by Friedrich Krause, ex-sergeant
of dragoons, in 1811. As the tale turned around the attempts of a king and his daughters to rob
the three soldier heroes of their magic gifts, and their subsequent recovery, it contained plenty
of opportunity for the kind of social vengeance and violent misogyny which was a marked
feature of Krause’s and many other soldiers’ tales. Plume-Patte and his brothers, for example,
beat and then burn to death the three princesses and their mother.25
The similarities between Conan’s and Plume-Patte’s sentry-duties are striking: they were
both sent to a dangerously isolated location at midnight; both knew that previous sentries have
been found dead; both initially heard rather than saw their phantom visitor and both were
momentarily frightened by the monstrous apparition; but both recovered their wits and
performed their proper soldierly duty, ordering the figure to speak, and this proved to be their
salvation.The words Conan used, both on this and on an immediately preceding occasion when
he had been sent at midnight on sentry-duty to a ruined – and supposedly haunted – monastery,
echo those of Plume-Patte. When his corporal came to relieve Conan at the monastery he told
him that ‘I had not seen any human being, be they alive or dead’, and he reiterated the point
to his comrades who were unwilling to believe him. Similarly, Plume-Patte tells his relief, his
brothers and his colonel that he had seen nothing. It seems a reasonable supposition that Conan
had heard a version of this story during his military career, perhaps even during his stay in
Bingen (which might explain how elements of a tale more at home east of the Rhine found
their way to Brittany), and that the two became mixed in his autobiography. This is not to
suggest, however, that there was anything confused about Conan’s use of fairytale motifs: they
are, on the contrary, very revealing about Conan himself and about the function of folktales in
oral cultures.
Storytelling in the army was not just a way of killing time, it was also a way of learning
military mores, acquiring a military identity. It was, after all, the audience which decided what
was an acceptable narrative, and so narrators, if they were to be successful and allowed to speak,
learned to adapt their personal store of tales to fit the expectations of their new community
within the regiment. Misogyny, the dominant tone in the story of Plume-Patte, though not a
soldiers’ monopoly (Ménétra’s narrative also contains a misogynistic strain), was certainly a part
24 Emmanuel Cosquin, Contes populaires de Lor- story should not be believed, it is a fantasy.
raine (Paris, 1886), vol. II, 89: Les trois frères. In 25 Gonthier-Louis Fink, ‘The fairy tales of the
French military slang one might be sent to ‘tell that Grimms’ sergeant of dragoons J. F. Krause as reflect-
one to Plume-Patte’ (a legendary barber of the ing the needs and wishes of the common people’ in
Zouaves) in the same way that a British sailor might James M. McGlathery (ed.), The Brothers Grimm and
be sent to ‘tell it to the marines’. In other words this Folktale (Urbana, Ill., 1991), 146–63.

of this group identity. Conan, who tells the reader that he had ‘taken my musket for my wife’,
and who fails to mention at any point his actual marriage (or the death of his first wife, or his
second marriage, all of which took place during these years), had certainly acquired this aspect
of the soldier’s character, announcing at the beginning of his memoirs that ‘women are the
fount of all misery’. The Avanturio contains several lengthy descriptions of horrific violence
inflicted by soldiers on women.26 This, Plume-Patte taught, is what it was to be a soldier.
Another element of the soldier’s character is implicit in the tale but more evident in Conan’s
narrative, the idea that evil spirits had no power over soldiers under arms. Conan returned to
this theme later in the Avanturio, when he came to grips with a revenant who haunted the barn
of the mayor on whom he was billeted (this incident may also derive from a fairytale: type
330B The Devil in the Knapsack, a common narrative vehicle for military heroes): ‘With some
well-chosen words, I conjured him to stop and to go away, to get back to his proper place, and
to leave the people of this world to sleep in peace.’27 Belief might be too strong a term for this
notion; rather, it was part of the image soldiers created for themselves, not least in their dealings
with civilian populations. The latter found it credible (the mayor apparently believed in this
power, which was why he locked Conan in the barn in the first place); soldiers, masters of iron
and fire, were too close to the demon to be scared of him. But as part of the soldier’s self-image
it also gave Conan the courage he needed when faced with what he thought was a demon in
the woods on the Rhine.
A more obvious moral is provided by Plume-Patte’s advice to his brother, about to take his
turn in the haunted tower, ‘to remember to do your duty well’. However, the concept of duty
expressed in soldiers’ tales was very far from what their officers would have understood as ideal
conduct. The tale demanded that the soldier showed mastery of himself, symbolized in Plume-
Patte’s refusal of the proffered purse from the phantom’s hand (which would have put him in
his power), but not necessarily obedience to every article of war. Plume-Patte and his brothers
proved less than perfect soldiers, for once they had their magic gifts they deserted. Conan also
failed to obey his direct orders to shoot on sight the intruder – who turned out to be a Catholic
priest – and let him pass unreported through the lines. The lower ranks had their own concepts
of what constituted proper military behaviour, which were inculcated through storytelling and
other unofficial practices, concepts that could include desertion, marauding and conflict with
superiors, all of which, according to military regulations, might have merited death.
Conan’s disobedience brings us back to the question of why he used a fairytale motif in his
own story. Because fairytales were told as fantasies, and because the characters were types rather
than personalities, it was easy for anyone and everyone to see themselves in the role of the hero,
and to make the hero’s story their own too. This is what Conan did in the Avanturio, and he
did it to produce a particular effect in his narrative. In her introduction, Mona Sohier-Ozouf
describes the Avanturio as the simple tale of a pious, backwoods Breton Catholic being initiated
into the grander history of French patriotism and republican virtues by the mechanism of the
army.28 The narrative is rather more ambiguous, however, certainly up until this encounter.
Letting a priest pass through the lines at the period when the French republic was at the
beginning of its dechristianizing campaign, and when many of Conan’s comrades believed they
26 This aspect of Conan’s character and text is 27 Conan, Aventures, op. cit., 138.
discussed by Joël Cornette: Conan, Avanturio, op. 28 ibid., 16.
cit., 39–41.

were fighting an international clerical and aristocratic conspiracy, was tantamount to treason.
Yet Conan, who had worked in a monastery as a servant, remained deeply devout throughout
his revolutionary years. When he subsequently met this same cleric in Bingen he very nearly
succumbed to his offer to help him desert and join the priesthood, apparently Conan’s long-
felt ambition. The phantom in the woods came bearing gifts for Conan, as it did for Plume-
Platte. But when the same priest became implicated in a counter-revolutionary plot to massacre
the garrison (which, it should be said, may only ever have existed in Conan’s mind), he
distanced himself from him, although he never revealed to his superiors his own part in allowing
the plotters to keep in touch with the allies’ side of the Rhine. By framing this entire episode
with elements of a fairytale, Conan could portray himself as justified in his actions not only
during the encounter in the woods when he let the priest go, but also later when he became
suspicious of the priest’s offers. In the tale, after all, the figure bearing gifts is an evil spirit (in
most versions the devil himself). Conan used the story to explain why he had decided to reject
holy orders and everything that stood for in 1792: ‘I preferred to stay a good soldier rather than
become a bad priest and thus abandon my courage to live like a coward.’29 Instead he was
confirmed in his new identity as citizen-soldier and sworn enemy of all refractory priests –
‘those infernal monsters’.
A question that exercised Daniel Roche about Ménétra concerned how it was possible for
an eighteenth-century ‘man of the people’ to write the story of his own life when there were
no models available to him. It has been argued that before Rousseau, before the Romantics,
before consumerism allowed individuals to exercise choice over their looks and their dress, the
collective weighed much more heavily than the personal in the construction of identity. For
peasants and artisans – but also for many of those further up the social scale – what mattered
was family, household, lineage, occupation, neighbourhood and religious faith. The relative
rarity of ego-documents (memoirs, diaries, confessions) from before the industrial revolution
was less the consequence of illiteracy than of a more diffuse sense of self. The use of folktale
motifs by popular memoirists nuances this picture somewhat. The autobiographers I have cited
drew on the collective, anonymous, ubiquitous sources of oral popular culture, but in order to
make a narrative of their own lives, as part of the explanation of ‘how I became myself ’.
Moreover, we can surmise that it was not just the handful of people who committed pen to
paper who picked and chose among the stories they heard, and then refashioned them to fit
their own circumstances and to express their own personalities. Folklorists like the Grimms
believed that the stories they recorded were a collective inheritance from a distant past: what
changes individual narrators brought to their tales were mistakes, which needed to be corrected
by blending several versions of the same tale. As one folklorist told Jean-Marie Déguignet,
‘legends do not require exactitude, nor name nor place nor date’30 but when we compare the
complete repertoires of particular narrators we can see that these reflect and comment on their
own situation – their occupation, their age, their experiences – and are expressive of individ-
ualized personalities. Twentieth-century folklorists have long since realized this, and in studies
of contemporary storytellers they have emphasized how each narrator shapes the material of
the tale to suit their own lives.31 The historian could argue that such ‘individualism’ is just what
29 ibid., 145. Gottfried Henssen, Ueberlieferung und Persönlichkeit:

30 Déguignet, Histoire de ma vie, op. cit., 96. Die Erzählungen und Lieder des Egbert Gerritz
31 The pioneering study of this kind was (Munster, 1951).

we might expect in modern narratives, but it is not necessarily relevant to pre-industrial
storytelling. The same kind of analysis can be applied to historical collections, as Gonthier-
Louis Fink has shown for the Grimms’ Sergeant Krause.32 Thus men (and women) ‘of the
people’ did have models with which to make sense of their personal experiences and turn them
into narrative. They told folktales as a way of talking about themselves, and it is this practice
that resurfaces in autobiographies.33
When these autobiographers fashioned through their memoirs from the ‘apparently seamless
raiment of just the sort that we all weave to clothe ourselves before others’,34 they cut their
coat from the material they had to hand, including the tales they had heard, and in some cases
told, throughout their careers. However, this does not mean that Bangofsky never paid a dead
man’s debts, or that Coignet never had an affair with a Parisian lady of fashion, or that Conan
never met a priest in the woods near Bingen (though, of course, it is also possible that none of
these events ever occurred at all). Nor do I want to suggest that they used folktale motifs simply
as narrative strategies, or that they were part of the style they utilized when they came to put
pen to paper. The autobiographers discussed here remained part of an oral culture after they
left the military, and the texts they left had been long rehearsed through oral reminiscence. As
Coignet wrote in his conclusion, well before it occurred to him to write his memoirs, he had
been ‘ploughing through my mind for all my old memories’.35 The integration of folkloric
motifs into their stories implies that, for these writers, they were part of the way they recalled
these events in conversation, part of their memory of them, and maybe even part of their
interpretation of them at the time. Fairytales were one element in their mental tool kit: they
were integral to the way they explained their lives to themselves, and also to others.
The difference between oral performance and a written autobiography, as an expression of
self, lies in the power of intervention possessed by the audience. A good narrator must tailor
his story to fit the expectations of his listeners. The latter will certainly correct or comment on
the narrative if it fails to satisfy. A tale is not allowed to stand alone: it participates in a dialogue
in which the rights of the community are constantly reasserted against those of the individual.36
Storytelling allows for the expression of personal identity, but only within a collective framework
of norms, aesthetic as well as social. If the story does not meet these norms the narrator will
be told to hold his tongue.The ability of storytelling to achieve a balance between individuality
and conformity helps to explain that more diffuse sense of self in the pre-modern era.37
32 And more recently, and much more fully, 35 Coignet, Cahiers, op. cit., 437.
Marie-Louis Ténèze and Georges Delarue have 36 For an example of this process in action see
shown for Nannette Lévesque, conteuse et chanteuse du Alessandro Falassi, Folklore by the Fireside: Text and
pays des sources de la Loire (Paris, 2000). Context of the Tuscan Veglia (Austin, Texas, 1980),
33 For convincing demonstrations of the rela- 135–7.
tionship of the individual narrator to their reper- 37 It is noticeable that some of the autobiogra-
toire see two works on the extensive collection phers considered here, such as Conan, felt isolated
made in nineteenth-century Jutland by the Danish from their communities and unable to communi-
folklorist Evald Tang Kristensen: Bengt Holbek, cate with their kin. Frustrated that their individual
Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Folklore Fellows Com- vision of the world found no audience at home,
munications 239 (Helsinki, 1987); and Timothy R. they turned to the pen in the hope that their
Tangherlini, Interpreting Legend: Danish Storytellers manuscript might, in the words of Jean-Marie
and their Repertoires (New York, 1994). Déguignet, ‘fall into the hands of some strangers,
34 Mark Traugott, The French Worker: Autobiogra- and provoke in them some of the sympathy towards
phies from the Early Industrial Era (Berkeley and Los me which I have looked for in vain during my life’.
Angeles, 1993), 1. In fact he gave his first set of notebooks into the

Recognizing folktale motifs does not, therefore, simply help to elucidate these texts; it also
suggests some of the functions of oral storytelling in the pre-industrial communities in which
the practice flourished. Through folktales the audience learned about the ways of the world
and the strategies they needed to acquire to operate within it.The process started in childhood:
as Déguignet explained, fairytales were intended to be educational, teaching the children of
the poor how to survive in an unequal world. As the example of the cabin boy Letellier has
shown, stories could mobilize individuals to action. He imagined himself as the hero of the
tales told by old sailors (part of their own self-projection), and so chose the sea over the land
for his career. Within the context of the regiment, or on board ship, folktales were also used
to communicate between narrators and audiences. Storytelling created an alternative hierarchy
in which wit and charisma mattered more than stripes on the sleeve, and it opened an arena
in which the men could speak of their concerns. It is noticeable, for example, how often
soldiers’ and sailors’ tales, like that of Plume-Patte, explicitly treat of relations between men
and officers, and of the ways in which one might escape military and naval discipline. Trouble
with superiors, together with the dream (sometimes converted into reality) of evasion, are also
frequent topics in soldiers’ memoirs. Both Bangofsky and Conan considered desertion at least
once in their careers (in fact, although this is not explained clearly in the Avanturio, Conan was
a deserter when he embarked for Newfoundland in 1788). Narration gave soldiers and sailors
the fantasy of revenge over their officers, but it also allowed them to explore avenues of
resistance, such as desertion, and the consequences that might flow from such acts. By telling
tales they could sound out the opinion of their comrades through the reaction of their audience,
while all the time masking their own intentions behind the fiction of the tale. Officers
understood this, and so deliberately eavesdropped on storytelling occasions in order to discover
the men’s complaints (without appearing to pay them any notice). It was a form of disguised
negotiation.38
If these assertions are correct then historians have at their disposal a large array of sources in
which to hear the voices of subordinated social groups, and not just in the form of personal
statements but also in conversation with each other and with their social superiors. Maynes’s
study includes about thirty autobiographies by French workers born in the nineteenth century,
and perhaps an equal number might be added by the inclusion of memoirs not originally meant
for publication. Soldiers’ narratives are more frequently encountered but are still not common,
especially for the lower ranks. The French folktale archive, however, contains about 10,000
narratives (and this is a fairly small collection, compared with those made in other European
countries) and remains largely unexplored by historians.The notable exceptions, such as Robert
Darnton and Eugen Weber, have used folktales to illustrate the collective experiences of the
hands of the regionalist writer Anatole Le Braz, Déguignet’s relations with Le Braz are considered
whom Déguignet came to suspect had taken them in Alain Tanguy, ‘Anatole Le Braz sur le banc des
merely to plunder the traditional tales they con- accusés: l’affaire Déguignet à la lumière de docu-
tained. Déguignet craved recognition for his liter- ments inédits’, Bulletin de la société archéologique du
ary talents, but the limited celebrity he achieved in Finistère, CXXVIII (1999), 307–18.
his life came to him as the informant of a famous 38 For examples of this aspect of military story-
folklorist. Having battled all his life to promote his telling see David Hopkin, ‘La Ramée, the archetypal
personal beliefs concerning religion, politics and soldier, as an indicator of popular attitudes to the
family against the powerful forces of conformity in army in nineteenth-century France’, French History,
his native Brittany, he feared that Le Braz would XIV (2000), 115–49.
make him play the part of their spokesman.

past, such as hunger, rather than to investigate individual sensibilities or the dynamics of specific
communities.39
The folktale archive has other advantages for social historians. The working-class memoirists
quoted by Maynes were usually old and male, urban and literate, militant or successful. Many,
though not all, were motivated by a vision of history in which their own class were the bearers
of the keys to the kingdom, the vanguard preparing the way for a new and better society. Their
memoirs took the form of conversion narratives, in which they recounted their own political
awakening and, through their writing, sought to bring others to the same enlightenment. Many
social historians have shared some of their assumptions about the trajectory of history, and so
the making and onward march of the industrial working class has been a prominent topic for
historical enquiry. Folktales, on the other hand, were more frequently collected from those
consigned, like the Mensheviks, to ‘the dustbin of history’ – illiterate peasants, migrant farm
labourers, rural handcraftworkers, gypsies, vagrants and criminals. Above all, and despite the
argument made above about the importance of the male work community to the storytelling
tradition, folklorists were led by the paradigm of ‘Mother Goose’ to seek out women and
children as their preferred sources. Consequently folktale collections were made from among
precisely those social groups who are otherwise silenced in history in ways in which male
industrial workers, despite the obstacles they had to overcome, are not. Their stories might
prove a useful corrective to the gender and other imbalances which affect historians’ sources
and, perhaps, their preconceptions.
Given the increasing interest in the plurality of the past, and with it the re-evaluation of the
marginal and the dispossessed, historians’ continued reluctance to tackle folkloric sources seems
all the more surprising. The reason may lie in the gendered aspects of the two disciplines.
Michelle Perrot, expressing a widespread prejudice within the historical profession, has claimed
that folklore ‘is in certain aspects the negation of history, a way of transforming tensions and
conflicts into tranquil rites’. History belongs in the public world of men and deeds, while
folklore stays by the fireside in the domestic, humdrum world of women.40 History is the
masculine subject – scientific, rational, progressive, professionalized and financially rewarded –
compared to supposedly counter-rational folklore with its connotations of the unchanging
maternal (and practised, at least in the United Kingdom, by underpaid amateurs). One purpose
of this article has been to counter these stereotypes. Not only did folklore march with armies
and sail with navies, but traditional tales provided the means by which individual soldiers and
sailors understood their own engagement with ‘history’, and influenced their behaviour as they
fought out their ‘tensions and conflicts’. Our comprehension of the military world will be
enriched by this knowledge.
University of Glasgow
39 Weber, ‘Fairies and hard facts’, op. cit., 93–113; (first published 1979) in M. Perrot, Les Femmes ou
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other les silences de l’histoire (Paris, 1998), 154. Of course
Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984), Perrot’s point is that women were also vitally
17–78. involved in ‘tensions and conflicts’.
40 Michelle Perrot, ‘La Femme populaire rebelle’

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Storytelling, fairytales and autobiography: some

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Social History Vol. 29 No. 2 May 2004

Storytelling, fairytales and

French soldiers’ and sailors’ memoirs1

May 2004 Storytelling, fairytales and autobiography 187

188 Social History vol. 29 : no. 2

May 2004 Storytelling, fairytales and autobiography 189

190 Social History vol. 29 : no. 2

May 2004 Storytelling, fairytales and autobiography 191

192 Social History vol. 29 : no. 2

Perou,Yann-Ber Piriou and Pierre Salaun (Morlaix,

May 2004 Storytelling, fairytales and autobiography 193

194 Social History vol. 29 : no. 2

May 2004 Storytelling, fairytales and autobiography 195

29 ibid., 145. Gottfried Henssen, Ueberlieferung und Persönlichkeit:

196 Social History vol. 29 : no. 2

May 2004 Storytelling, fairytales and autobiography 197

198 Social History vol. 29 : no. 2

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