ABSTRACT
In addition to conscription, the empire also signified impoverishment. In the first place, the passage of the French armies across the continent was immensely disruptiye. Despite more or less genuine efforts to maintain discipline, the soldiers supplemented their rations by living off the country, fed their campfires with furniture, window frames, doors and fencing, and added to their pay by seizing a wide variety of valuables and trinkets of all sorts. Not even friendly territory was spared, a French hussar officer speaking of the grande armee traversing France in 1808 'as if it had been a land newly conquered and subject to our arms'.2 In territory clearly identified as hostile the situation was even worse, for here officers were less inclined to restrain their men, the authorities being reduced 'to such a state of terror that they . . . did a good deal more than they had in the first instance been called upon to do'.3 In extreme cases, the result could be wholesale devastation. To quote a British eyewitness of events in Portugal in 1811:
.1 O. Williams (ed.), In the Wake of Napoleon: beillg the Memoirs of Ferdinand von Funck, Lieutenant General in the Saxon Army and Adjutant General to the King of Saxony (London, 1931), pp. 968.
