« Une mort sans gloire » ? La mortalité de la gendarmerie impériale en Espagne (1809-1814)
Gildas Lepetit
Revue historique des armeés, 259, 2010, p. 13-22

"A death without glory?" The mortality of the imperial gendarmerie in Spain (1809-1814). Sometimes stigmatized by certain military governors serving in the peninsula, the service of the gendarmerie in Spain was nonetheless hard on bodies and souls. The nine hundred gendarmes who died beyond the Pyrenees make the Spanish war of the Napoleonic campaign the deadliest for the gendarmerie. With half of their losses from enemy fire, the squadrons were more severely affected than the rest of the imperial armies, reversing the image of an arm designed solely to restrain the excesses of the soldiery in the field. The study of mortality helps show the materiel inadequacies of the military in this arm – especially regular and gendarme noncommissioned officers – but also the seasoning of the insurgents, the increasing power of their arms, and declining French influence in the peninsula. Ultimately, more than just simple accounting and statistics, the analysis of mortality in the squadrons in Spain emerges as a powerful indicator of living conditions and the evolution of a conflict.

http://journals.openedition.org/rha/6977?gathStatIcon=true&lang=fr