Jean-Roch Coignet was a French soldier who served in the military campaigns of the Consulate and First French Empire, up through the Battle of Waterloo.
14 Facts About Jean-Roch Coignet
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Jean-Roch Coignet later wrote his memoirs detailing his military service, The Notebooks of Captain Coignet, which are still being reprinted.
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Jean-Roch Coignet participated in 16 campaigns and 48 battles, never having been wounded.
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Jean-Roch Coignet received a musket of honour for single-handedly capturing an Austrian cannon at the Battle of Montebello.
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Jean-Roch Coignet fought hard at the battle of Marengo, constantly in the thick of the action, in which he and his fellow soldiers had to hold out until French reserves arrived.
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Jean-Roch Coignet survived the battle, and was promoted to the Consular Guard and awarded the Legion d'honneur.
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Jean-Roch Coignet was a witness to negotiations at the Treaty of Tilsit between Napoleon and the Emperor of Russia.
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Albert Vidalie 8.
Jean-Roch Coignet then fought at Aspern-Essling, in which he and his comrades found themselves under fire from fifty Austrian guns.
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Jean-Roch Coignet was sent on a series of solo missions for the Emperor during the disastrous invasion of Russia.
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Jean-Roch Coignet took part in an attack on the redoubts during the battle of Borodino.
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Jean-Roch Coignet witnessed the death of general Caulaincourt, whom he accompanied into the fray.
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Jean-Roch Coignet began to write his memories after the death of his wife in August 1848.
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Years after his death in 1865, in 1883, the writer Loredan Larchey, by revising and rewriting Jean-Roch Coignet's memoirs, published broad extracts of Aux vieux de la vieille under the title The Notebooks of the Captain Jean-Roch Coignet, which met with immediate success.
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Coignet was the subject of a French TV miniseries, Jean-Roch Coignet, which was written by Albert Vidalie and directed by Claude-Jean Bonnardot.