Michelot Moulin - Mémoires de Michelot Moulin sur la Chouannerie Normande - 1893

The Memoirs of Michelot Moulin on the Norman Chouannerie constitute one of the most important and reliable historical testimonies on the royalist uprising in the Norman bocage.
Published in 1893 in Paris by the publisher Alphonse Picard et fils for the account of the Society of Contemporary History (of which it forms the 4th volume), this XV-403 page work was edited and annotated at the time by Viscount Louis Rioult de Neuville.

Michel Moulin (1771–1840), nicknamed “Michelot,” was an artisan butcher from Saint-Jean-des-Bois (Orne). Refractory to the republican conscription, he became one of the principal military leaders of the Norman Chouannerie and the first lieutenant of General Louis de Frotté.

• The clandestinity and the combats: The raw, realistic, unembellished account of ambushes and daily battles conducted in the Norman bocage (Vire, Tinchebray, Domfront) against the blue troops (the Republicans).
• Exile and secret missions: Arrested in 1804 by the Imperial police and imprisoned at the Fort de Joux, he spectacularly escaped in 1805. Exiled in England, he subsequently carried out several secret espionage and liaison missions in France on behalf of the émigré Bourbons.
• The Hundred Days (1815): His final attempts to raise Normandy against Napoleon I just before the Battle of Waterloo.

Unlike other romanticized 19th-century narratives, historians consider Michelot Moulin’s text to be a source of first rank. Its simple, factual, precise tone depicts the material reality of a local civil war and the difficult daily life of the insurgents.

The paper is strikingly white and clean for a book that is more than 130 years old.
• backstrip complete, with no major loss of material, and the gilt lettering remains perfectly legible. The book’s overall structure is solid.

Warning 4 unscanned pages
Memoirs of Michelot Moulin 403 numbered pages