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Updated: May 13, 2025
Some assert that he was shot by the grenadiers of Bonaparte's Italian guard; others say, by a detachment of the Gendarmes d'Elite; and others again, that the men of both these corps refused to fire, and that General Murat, hearing the troops murmur, and fearing their mutiny, was himself the executioner of this young and innocent Prince of the House of Bourbon, by riding up to him and blowing out his brains with a pistol.
Ere I had left Paris to join in the campaign against Prussia, I had made, and broken off, another dangerous friendship. In the compagnie d'élite was an officer named Duchesne who took a liking to me a royalist at heart, and a cynic who was unfailing in his sneers at all the doings of Napoleon.
This son of a Swiss porter is now one of Bonaparte's adjutants-general, a colonel of the Gendarmes d'Elite, a general of brigade in the army, and a commander of the Legion of Honour; all these places he owes, not to valour or merit, but to abjectness, immorality, and servility.
On the day of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, a company of gendarmes d'Elite, headed by their officers, received publicly, and by orders, the sacrament; when the Abbe Frelaud approached Lieutenant Ledoux, he fell into convulsions, and was carried into the sacristy.
It was then a question of drill and nothing but drill. In his camp near Tientsin the future President of the Chinese Republic succeeded in reorganizing his troops so well that in a very short time the Hsiaochan Division became known as a corps d'élite. The discipline was so stern that there were said to be only two ways of noticing subordinates, either by promoting or beheading them.
They were not taken till five days after the arrest of the Duc d'Enghien. The famous Commissioner Comminges, accompanied by an inspector and a detachment of gendarmes d'Elite, found Villeneuve and Burban Malabre in the house of a man named Dubuisson, in the Rue Jean Robert. This Dubuisson and his wife had sheltered some of the principal persons proscribed by the police.
The little fort could hold but a small garrison, but the force was a corps d'élite: De Broglio of Piedmont commanded it with sixty soldiers, and was supported by Juan de Guaras, bailiff of the Negropont, a splendid old Knight, followed by sixty more of the Order, and some Spaniards under Juan de la Cerda: a few hundred of men to meet thirty thousand Turks, but men of no common mettle.
This was just what Wayne wanted, and with three Pennsylvania regiments, one from Maryland, and one from Virginia, he stayed the assaults of the flower of the English army, the corps d'élite, and successfully held his line, causing the enemy to retire with great loss. General Washington commended General Wayne in the highest terms for his "good conduct and bravery through the whole action."
The presence of the Guards, the corps d'elite of the German army, suggested that this was intended to be a main attack upon Paris and that the army at Meaux was to occupy the center. The four combined corps numbered over 200,000. The French met them, they assert, with 190,000.
A portion of the Luxembourg was devoted to the reception of the compagnie d'élite for whom a household on the most liberal scale was provided, a splendid table maintained, and all that wealth and the taste of a voluptuous age could suggest, procured, to make their life one of daily magnificence and pleasure.
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