The battle Napoleon Bonaparte lost to rabbits
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After the peace treaty of Tilsit in July 1807 was signed, the emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, wanted to celebrate by going on a hunt, according to History Defined.
Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Napoleon’s chief of staff and minister of war, organized the hunt on his own piece of land outside Paris, per Curious Rambler.
Baron Thiébault, a general in Napoleon’s army, described the event in his memoir. He said Berthier’s land “possessed everything calculated to make the sport agreeable,” except for rabbits.
But this lack of prey couldn’t stop Berthier, who believed “rabbits are common enough,” and felt capable of making them appear on his land. One thousand rabbits were promptly ordered from local farms to be delivered to his property the morning of the hunt.
The hunt began, and the rabbits were released from their cages. Shots rang out from Napoleon and his men, but instead of dashing away as expected, they approached the hunters looking for food, according to Thiébault’s memoir.
Thiébault described, “All those rabbits, which should have tried in vain, even by scattering themselves, to escape the shots which the most august hand destined for them, suddenly collected first in knots, then in a body; instead of having recourse to a useless flight, they all faced about, and in an instant the whole phalanx flung itself upon Napoleon.”
In other words, 1,000 rabbits ran right at Napoleon, piling themselves “up between his legs till they made him stagger.”
In the middle of his conquest of continental Europe, the emperor who defeated the Austrians and Russians, reestablished the aristocracy in France and consequently altered world history, met his match against a flock of rabbits, per History.
Thiébault’s memoir concludes its story of the hunt by saying the rabbits “forced the conqueror of conquerors, fairly exhausted, to retreat and leave them in possession of the field, only thankful that some of them had not succeeded in scaling the rumble of the Emperor’s carriage and getting themselves borne in triumph to Paris.”
Witnesses of Napoleon’s rabbit incident were sworn to secrecy to protect their leader’s image, and it wasn’t until 1895 that Thiébault published his memoirs in French. One year later, they were published in English, per Cambridge.
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