"Without hesitation, I took the tricolour cockade..." Memoirs of General de Montfort

Memoirs of General de Montfort, Officer of the Corps of Engineers during the Revolutionary and First Empire Wars

« Since Smolensk, we had, so to speak, not seen the enemy, [...] there had not been, strictly speaking, since the beginning of the campaign, a pitched battle, one of those battles that decide the outcome of a campaign, sometimes of an empire, such as the Emperor was accustomed to winning, such as he had won at Austerlitz, at Jena. The whole army felt, and the Emperor doubtless felt as clearly as we did, the danger of continuing to press deeper into the heart of Russia, in pursuit of an almost intact army, before having completely defeated that army. He therefore ordered all the preparations for a general engagement. The whole army rejoiced at the prospect of the event these measures foreshadowed. »

Swept along by the whirlwind of history, General Joseph Puniet de Monfort recorded throughout his life the major events of his time, bequeathing to us a remarkable testimony. He was one of the key figures at the Battle of Leipzig and was wrongly accused of having blown up a bridge during the retreat of the French forces. These memoirs, published here for the first time, immerse the reader in the campaigns of the engineering officers under the Revolution and the Empire.