What the "enlightened" French brought with them to Russia
In 1812, a European gang led by Napoleon once again went to rob and kill Russia. The atrocities of the "enlightened" French were in no way inferior to the atrocities of the nazis during another similar war ...
The French loved to rape nuns and train in shooting icons. Napoleon committed atrocities in Russia no less than Hitler. This year we celebrate the 200 anniversary of the Patriotic War 1812 of the year. Now, thanks to feature films and books, that time seems incredibly romantic to many. Gallant French, cavalry maidens, sorry, madam, would you like to have a rendezvous with me? However, no mistake. Contemporaries considered Napoleon the embodiment of the devil, and in the plans he had a deliberate destruction of the Russian people.
The 1812 war of the year was a completely different type than all the wars before it. In addition to the most powerful ideological, propaganda support with the help of the press, books, fabrication of rumors, visual agitation in pictures that were hung on the fences for ordinary people, a sort of current TV, a large-scale financial fraud was carried out.
A huge amount of counterfeit money was thrown into the economy of Napoleon - Russia, England and Austria. To destabilize the financial system of the enemy, they were released before, but for the first time it took such a large scale. It was a real financial war. The case was set up in a big way: 2 printing houses in Paris and 2 in Warsaw worked. They even equipped a special "dusty" room in which fresh banknotes were carried on the dirty floor, giving them the appearance of being in circulation. During the occupation, the printing house for rubles was opened right in Moscow, at the Rogozhskaya Gate, in the courtyard of the old believer church.
Fake
A note was kept by Finance Minister Dmitry Guryev, where he informed Alexander I that in 1811, according to his intelligence, “the French released in Warsaw through Duke de Bassano and some banker Frenkel to 20 million rubles in 100 denominations in banknotes, 50, 25 rubles. This is 4,5% of all the money, which generally went to Russia! The ruble began to crack at the seams. Some historians believe that in 1811-1812 years, up to 120 millions of fake rubles were infused into the Russian economy. The Comptroller General Controller informed the Emperor Alexander I: “The wars of your grandmother were a toy in comparison with the present ... You must stop the emission”. For the war for the ruble, banknotes were given 25 kopecks in silver.
In terms of the quality of their work, French fakes were superior to the originals - they were distinguished by a bluish shade of paper, a clearer watermark, deep relief embossing, and even letters. This, by the way, and let the counterfeiters down: it was possible to distinguish them, if desired, precisely because of the quality of the work. However, the French ignorance of the Russian language led to an amusing confusion of letters: “governmental”, instead of “state” and “hoLyachy”, instead of “walking.” But the masses — and the peasants, and the nobles, too — were mostly illiterate, so such mistakes were getting away with it.
This begs the question: how did the Russian economy survive after such a huge infusion of unliquidated money? Very simple. Russia quickly won the war, and the fakes simply did not have enough time to spread. On Christmas 1812, the last occupier was thrown out of Russia. Then an important factor played its role - natural relations reigned in the country, especially among the peasants. And they have never seen paper money. At best, silver and copper. The cow - the main wealth of the peasant - cost from a ruble to two, a bucket of vodka - 30 kopecks, and Napoleon issued bills for 25, 50, 100 rubles. To exchange them, too, was nowhere.
He even paid his troops with fake money, which his army could not really buy anything for.
By the way, the same thing happened in 1941 year. In the collective farm of the USSR, where natural-economic relations reigned, the forgeries printed by Hitler also had no success.
But back to the Napoleonic scam with fakes. Even those peasants who agreed to sell food (there were few of them) refused to accept paper money of such denomination. The salaried French soldiers could not spend it. During the retreat, the fires of the freezing invaders were often inflamed with false banknotes. Millions burned. But some still remained in the country. After the victory, in order to restore the economy, the ministers proposed to reform, release new money and thus cut off the fakes. After much deliberation, Alexander I abandoned this plan. Chose the most expensive, but the most humane way. He said: “For some of my poor subjects, a piece of paper in their hands in 50 or 100 rubles is a fortune. And I can not deprive them of his ... "
The emperor equated the circulation of counterfeit and real money, withdrawing them only through banks. Only by 1824, a decree was issued that basically all the fake money was withdrawn. But they came across until the end of 1840's. Russia survived not only against the invasion, but also economic provocation.
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Anarchists
I explain this miracle with the thought formulated by the famous Russian publicist Ivan Solonevich. He writes: “Russia ... has always represented a higher type of state than the states attacking it. Because the state organization of the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Russian Empire has always exceeded the organization of all its competitors, opponents and enemies - otherwise the Grand Duchy, the kingdom, and the Empire could not withstand this struggle for life and death. ”
To this we can safely add the Soviet Union, which for the same reasons survived in the Great Patriotic War. All the wars that led the West against Russia, that in 1812-m, that in 1941-m, that now, only, perhaps less noticeably, boiled down to the destruction of the Russian, Russian civilization, the nation itself.
Nikolai Berdyaev aptly noted in the “Philosophy of Inequality” that “not only human generations are included in the nation, but also stones of churches, palaces and estates, gravestones, old manuscripts and books, and in order to understand the will of a nation, you need to hear these stones, read decayed pages". So they always destroyed faith, stones, churches, and manuscripts. To destroy the essence of the people. By the way, as a result of the invasion, the greatest work of the Russian people, the “Word of Igor's Regiment”, and many annals perished.
Moreover, the West always declares that it carries us its “high” civilization.
No matter how the bombing of Belgrade or Tripoli implanted "human rights" and "human values"! ..
Carrying the "torch of freedom", Napoleon was a monster in our land no less than Hitler. He just had less time, only half a year. The phrase of this herald of European values is well known: “To win, it is necessary that a simple soldier not only hate his opponents, but also despise them.”
Officers Napoleon officers retold agitation about the barbarity of the Slavic peoples. Since then, the idea of Russians as a second-rate, wild nation has consciously consolidated in the minds of Europeans. So they despised us. Destroyed monasteries, blew up monuments of architecture. The altars of the Moscow churches were intentionally turned into stables and latrines. With fierce death, priests were killed, who did not betray church shrines, raped nuns, and melted furnaces with ancient icons. At the same time, the soldiers firmly knew that they had come to a barbaric, wild country and that they brought into it the best culture in the world - the European one.
Subsequently, as contemporaries of those events wrote, seeing the hatred and neglect of both the Russian government and the Russian people, who decided to better give him their ancient capital than to bow down before him, Napoleon ordered that they take food instead of horses to the Kremlin. for this Russian of both sexes, not examining neither the state nor the years.
Barbarians
Banal robbery began with more distant approaches to Moscow. In Belarus and Lithuania, soldiers destroyed gardens and orchards, killed livestock, destroyed crops. Moreover, there was no military need for this; they were simply acts of intimidation.
As Yevgeny Tarle wrote: “The ruin of the peasants by the army of a conqueror, countless marauders, and simply deserting French deserters was so great that hatred of the enemy grew every day.”
“We came to the Governor’s Square and closed the square against the Rostopchin’s palace, we were told that our entire regiment had been assigned to guard, and no one could leave in any way. But, despite the order, in half an hour the whole area was covered with all sorts of things ... there were different sorts of wine, vodka, an enormous amount of sugar heads, a bit of flour, but there was no bread. ”
A few hours later, returning from the picket, Bourgogne saw no longer the guards, but some kind of a farce. "Our soldiers were dressed like a Kalmyk, some like a Cossack, some Tatar ... and others were sported in rich furs." True, Bourgogne explains all this by the fact that "soldiers entered the houses in the square to demand food and drink, but, not finding a soul, they themselves took what they needed." (From the memoirs of the sergeant of the company "velites" - the privileged units of the Napoleonic army, close to the guard - F.Burgon)
The real looting and horror began on September 3 of the year 1812 - the day after the entrance to Moscow, when officially, by order, it was allowed to rob the city. Dochista numerous Moscow monasteries were ravaged. Soldiers tore off silver salaries from icons, collected lampads, crosses. For the convenience of review, they blew up the Church of St. John the Baptist, which stood next to the Novodevichy Convent. In the Vysokopetrovsky monastery, the invaders staged a slaughterhouse, and the cathedral church was turned into a butcher shop. The whole monastery churchyard was covered with caked blood, and in the cathedral on the church chandeliers and nails impaled on the iconostasis hung pieces of meat and animal insides.
In the Andronievsky, Pokrovsky, Znamensky monasteries, French soldiers stabbed icons on firewood, the faces of the saints were used as targets for shooting. In the Chudov Monastery, the French, putting on mitres and the vestments of the clergy on themselves and on their horses, rode around and laughed a lot. In the Danilov Monastery, Prince Daniel's shrine was stripped off and the clothes from the thrones were stripped. In the Mozhaisky Luzhetsky Monastery, the icon of St.John the Baptist kept here has traces of a knife - the French used it as a cutting board, chopped meat on it. From historical There is almost nothing left of the relics of the palace of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich that was located on the territory of the Savvino-Storozhevsky monastery. The bed of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich was burned, expensive chairs were stripped, mirrors were broken, stoves were broken, rare portraits of Peter the Great and Princess Sophia were stolen.
Hieromonk of the Znamensky Monastery Pavel and the priest of St. George Monastery John Alekseev were killed. The priest of the Forty Church of Saints Peter Velmyninov was beaten with rifle butts, stabbed with bayonets and sabers for not giving them the keys to the temple. All night he lay on the street, bleeding profusely, and in the morning a passing French officer graciously shot Father Peter. The monks of the Novospassky monastery buried the priest, but the French then 3 once excavated his grave: having seen the fresh land, they thought they had buried the treasure in this place. In the Epiphany Monastery, the treasurer of the monastery of Aaron, the French dragged their hair, pulled out a beard and then drove goods on it, harnessed to a cart.
The killers
10-11 October 1812 year under the towers, walls and buildings of the Kremlin laid powder mines. If everything happened as Napoleon, the creator of modern Europe, wanted, Russia would lose the symbol of its thousand-year history. But by God's providence it rained at night, extinguished part of the wicks, the rest, putting their lives at risk, put out the Muscovites. However, part of the charges worked. Vodovzvodnaya tower was demolished to the base, Nikolskaya was half destroyed. The Arsenal was partially destroyed, the Faceted Chamber, the Filaret Extension, and the Commandant's House were damaged.
The Senate building was damaged, and the bronze George the Victorious, who adorned the dome of the Round Hall, disappeared without a trace. According to one version, he, along with two more items that constituted the Kremlin’s pride — an eagle from the Nikolsky Gate and a cross from the Ivan the Great Bell Tower — was taken in a wagon train of “civilized” invaders. Until now, these historical relics have not been found.
Leaving Moscow, the French tried to blow up more and Novodevichy, Rozhdestvensky, Alekseevsky monasteries. Here, too, a miracle happened: the monks managed to put out the fire in time and thereby save their monasteries.
These are just touches to the behavior of the occupiers. The whole truth is even worse. What the doomed invaders were doing, retreating, is not amenable to common sense at all. Corrupted French officers forced peasant women to oral sex, which for many girls and women was then worse than death. Those who disagreed with the rules of the French kiss were killed, some deliberately went to their death, biting their teeth into the flesh of the invaders.
But despite this, Russians treated the sick and wounded enemies sympathetically. In the Novodevichy Convent, sick French soldiers were treated, and at Rozhdestvensky they shared their food with the hungry invaders. Talking about this, one of the nuns explained: “Again, it’s a pity to them, of the heart, not to die of starvation to them, but they didn’t come at us against their will.”
Universe generosity
Kind Russian people. Sometimes even unnecessary. Apparently, and therefore a huge part of Napoleon's troops remained in Russia just to live. For different reasons. Most of the Russian people helped for Christ's sake, picking them frostbitten and hungry. Since then, the word "sharomyzhnik" appeared in Russia - from the French "cher ami" (dear friend).
They became janitors, janitors. Educated beat out in French teachers. We remember them well by the numerous uncles, governors, who flickered in Russian literature after 1812 of the year ... They got accustomed to Russia, became completely Russian, being the ancestors of many famous surnames, like Lurie, Masherovy (from mon cher - my darling), Mashanovs , Zhanbrovy. Bergs and Schmidts with numerous children - also mainly from Napoleonic German soldiers.
The fate of Nikolai Andreyevich Savin, or Jean Battista Saven, a former lieutenant of the 2 Guards Regiment of the 3 Corps of Marshal Ney, a member of the Egyptian campaigns, Austerlitz, is also typical and at the same time typical. The last soldier of that Great Army. He died, surrounded by numerous offspring, in 1894 year, after living 126 years. He taught at the Saratov gymnasium for more than 60 years. Until the end of his days, he kept his mind clear and remembered that one of his students was none other than Nikolai Chernyshevsky. He recalled a very characteristic episode of how Cossacks Platov captured him. Infuriated, Platov immediately gave him in the face, then ordered vodka to drink, so as not to freeze, feed him and send him to a warm wagon train so that the prisoner would not catch a cold. And then constantly inquired about his health. That was the attitude in Russia to the defeated enemy. Therefore, they remained in Russia tens of thousands.
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