French soldier, Marie-Thérèse Figueur (1774 – 1861) , nicknamed "Sans-Gêne" for her audacity and outspokenness, participated in many campaigns and battles.
Young orphan
Daughter of Claudine Viard and François Figueur, a miller, Marie-Thérèse Figueur was born on January 17, 1774 in Talmay, Burgundy. Her mother dies in childbirth. In her memoirs, Marie-Thérèse, or more simply Thérèse, wrote:"I was one of those children who should never know the sweetness of saying mom, or rather I was one of those children, even more unhappy, condemned to say Mom to someone who does not cherish them, my father having remarried a few years later. »
Thérèse lost her father at the age of nine, when she was still only a child. Her mother-in-law not wanting to take care of her, her maternal uncle, Joseph Viart, second lieutenant in the regiment of Dienne-Infanterie, became her guardian. At one time he entrusted it to a launderer by the name of Muideblé. For the young orphan raised by a stepmother who did not love her and who has just lost her father, it is a happy time. "Even today, she wrote in her memoirs, at sixty-nine, when I happen to think of those happy years I spent in that house in Rueil, with the good M. Muideblé, I always feel my eyes ready to wet with tears. »
It was there that Thérèse met Clément Sutter, her childhood best friend who would later become her husband. With Clément and her twin sister Victoire, Thérèse skips school and plays outdoors. “I was a real devil of a girl, she writes, used to climbing on my father's horses”. This happy period continues until her uncle decides to take Thérèse to Avignon, where he entrusts her to a cloth merchant who teaches her her job... which the little girl takes no pleasure in.
The French Revolution
Thérèse Figueur was fifteen when the French Revolution broke out. Little interested in politics, she only follows events with a distant and distracted ear and feels rather royalist sympathies. She testifies: “The revolution had broken out, and had been following its course for four years, that I had barely been aware of it. My eighteen years stirred me gently. This dreamy emotion which made me sad and sickly had at least had the advantage of hiding me from the passions of politics. However, I felt inclined towards royalism. »
In 1793, following the fall of the Girondins, the provinces revolted against Paris, armed troops and organized themselves into federalist companies. Thérèse's uncle, a retired soldier, resumes service to command a company of gunners. For his pupil, it is the birth of a true vocation. She accompanies her uncle everywhere, to the point that he ends up allowing her to dress as a man so that she can follow him even in the countryside.
"They took a piece of royal blue cloth from the shop and made me a gunner's suit. (…) Wearing a tail coat, a lighter by my side, and on my forehead this Republican three-cornered hat that I wore as a plate breaker, I intoned the Awakening of the people with the mass of our Federalist gunners. My uncle secretly recalled me to more honest sentiments and to the love of my king. I felt quite different:I was cheerful, alert, tireless. (…) The denial given to nature, which had fun creating me as a woman. My vocation had just been pronounced:Thérèse Figueur was a soldier. »
Soldier
Following the defeat of the Federalists against the Republican Allobroges Legion, Thérèse Figueur and her uncle were taken prisoner in July 1793. The young girl was faced with an alternative:enlist in the Republican army, or be executed. After consulting her uncle, she accepts conscription on one condition:his life is saved. It was at the time of her enlistment that her outspokenness earned her the nickname Sans-Gêne, as she testifies in her memoirs:“It was a question of giving me a nom de guerre. We stopped at that of Sans-Gêne, which was proposed by Sub-Lieutenant Chastel. 'I assure you,' he said, 'when we took her prisoner, she had no qualms about calling us cowards, since we were talking about killing two enemies who were no longer defending themselves.'"
Thérèse returned to the campaign, now fighting in the Republican army and striving to obtain pardon for the Federalist prisoners:“they are good Frenchmen; they were misled like me” . In the fall, she took part in the siege of Toulon, where she was wounded in the chest. The Allobroges Legion was then incorporated into the 15 th regiment of Dragoons in 1794. Thérèse continued her military training in Castres, learning horse riding and the handling of weapons, saber, sword, pistol, carabiner.
“The shy and delicate lover”
The soldier takes advantage of her Sundays, after a week of training and military exercises, to go to dance halls – where she is taken for a young man – and make “the pretty girls” dance. “I liked the rage dance. A sixteen-year-old child, the daughter of a gardener, a delicious brunette with a naivety that bordered on silliness and yet lovely, was at first my favorite dancer. . Relationships she describes as platonic:"I played the shy and delicate lover, sticking to compliments and tender protests, or brooding in a dreamy silence on all the happiness that a hand can give press in his, and at most a hastily plucked kiss at the moment of farewell. »
In her memoirs, these moments are mainly marked by the love of dancing, and a certain amusement at being mistaken for a man. Thérèse also tells how she almost married an officer, before giving up for fear of losing her freedom. A soldier in the middle of these male regiments, although she describes herself as never having been pretty, she is very popular and does not cut attempts at seduction. About the uncle of the one who almost became her husband, she writes:"he himself, under his physique of an old graybeard, had demonstrated vis-à-vis claims which did not rise, it is true , to my hand, and which I had been forced to stop at the knee. To cool him down, I had to throw all the hot tea from a teapot through his ruddy, rustic face. “
“Mademoiselle Figueur is a brave man”
Thérèse Figueur then continued the fight against the Spaniards with the army of the Pyrénées-Orientales. Her courage and outspokenness earned her such popularity that when the Committee of Public Safety banned women from serving in the French army, its officers signed a petition and obtained an exception for her. In Figuères, she takes two prisoners and kills a Spaniard who was about to shoot her. “I never forgot that face, she says, he kept me awake for more than a year. »
Near Girona, Thérèse saves General Noguez, abandoned as wounded, and takes him to a safe place. She then took part in the second Italian campaign. In 1799, at the battle of Savigliano, she received four saber cuts in the back and was taken prisoner. An exchange of prisoners allows her to regain her freedom, but she is weakened. The crossing of a ravine overflowing with icy water leaves her almost dying. On the advice of friends, she obtains a pension and rests in Châlons-sur-Saône.
Thérèse did not stay there long:“The job of canvasser suited me badly; My strength had returned, I said to myself that a helmet was definitely better than a cornette, that twenty-eight was not the age to enter the Invalides, and I thought of going back to work » . She then joined the 9 e regiment of Dragoons, which occupies a Parisian barracks. In Paris, she met Joséphine de Beauharnais and the then First Consul, Napoleon – with whom she had had an altercation at the siege of Toulon. After recalling their first meeting, the latter, according to Thérèse's memoirs, concedes to her:“Mademoiselle Figueur is a brave man” .
"This life was not to my liking"
After having been Joséphine de Beauharnais's maid for ten days, Thérèse Figueur, who is bored in this role, sets off again on the campaign; it took part in the battles of Ulm, Austerlitz and Jena. Seriously injured in a fall from a horse, she returned to Paris where she rested for 18 months, hardly ever leaving her room. A period of rest which, once again, makes him want to get back to work:"I must admit, this life that was always the same was not to my taste" .
Cured, Thérèse left for Spain in 1809. She fought little there but, in Burgos where she was stationed, won the affection of the priest who lodged her "despite the hatred that the Spaniards harbored against us" . She undertakes to come to the aid of her guests and of the poorest in the city by distributing food, bread, meat; she makes herself useful at the hospital and takes under her wing even the stray dogs of the city. A generosity that earned her to be spared when, in 1812, she was taken prisoner by guerrilla leader Geronimo Merino.
Prisoner in England
Merino entrusts Thérèse Figueur to a Scottish regiment then to the Portuguese from whom she and the other prisoners suffer ill-treatment. The soldier carefully hides her status as a woman, which, she testifies, saves her “a thousand inconveniences during the journey” . Detained for some time in Lisbon, she was then embarked for England; the crossing, marked by a deadly storm during which three ships disappeared, lasted 39 days. In England, she is lodged with a tailor.
In 1814, Napoleon's abdication and peace brought Thérèse back to freedom, which she rejoiced in while deploring it at the same time:“We were told that we were free. I would have preferred to owe my deliverance to some other cause. I was seized with a deep affliction, and yet I felt a strong desire to return to France at this very moment “. The following year, she attended a troop review by Napoleon, to whom she still had great admiration and with whom she exchanged a few words.
Retired soldier
Shortly after, Thérèse Figueur retired at the age of 41. Lacking resources, she moved to Paris where she ran a restaurant. There she finds her childhood friend, Clément Sutter, also a soldier, whom she had met during previous stays in Paris. Having become a quartermaster, Clément asked her to marry him, a request which she accepted not without concern:“I had a sincere affection for Clément; but such was my taste for freedom that on the morning of my wedding day I was still thinking” . They married in July 1818. “My husband was the person I loved best, a brave man; loyal, sober, tidy, of the sweetest and most even-tempered, a man of whom I was adored and, what does not spoil anything, a very handsome man " .
A happiness that will only last a while. Widowed eleven years after her marriage, Thérèse finds herself destitute again. She thus sadly concludes her memoirs, published in 1842 under the title The Campaigns of Mademoiselle Thérèse Figueur, today Madame Veuve Sutter :“I spent the rest of my years struggling with poverty. Today I am sixty-nine years old, and I own nothing. I have neither children nor family around me; I await death in a hospice with resignation. “
Thérèse Figueur “Sans-Gêne” died in 1861, at the age of 86.