Episode 130 - French General Loison, the wicked "Maneta", with special guest Charles Mackay

Despised for his cruelty, looting, and terror against the Portuguese, French General Loison was nonetheless a brave officer who served throughout the Peninsula War under Napoleon's marshals. Special guest Charles Mackay joins the show to discuss this infamous scourge of Portugal, nicknamed "Maneta" or "One-Hand".

Bluesky: @bubblesvampire.bsky.social, @andnapoleon.bsky.social

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome back to Generals and Napoleon.
We are blessed, truly blessed tohave my good friend Charles
McKay back on the line. How are Charles I?
Am good. Thanks for having me John.
I appreciate it. Thank you my friend.
For those of you who don't know Charles, really good blue sky
channel. If you haven't checked it out
you can find him there. What is the blue sky account?
Just so we all know. It's a bubbles vampire at

(00:22):
whatever the blue sky stuff is. Yeah, the Biscay or bsky dot.
Yeah, right. And just for the record, Charles
son named his account for him. Bubbles Vampire.
Yes, a long time ago, Yeah. He wanted a a Dungeons and
Dragons name for a vampire that wasn't too scary.
So we named him Bubbles, and that has taken out a new life.

(00:43):
Yeah, and today we're going to talk about a guy who probably
wasn't blessed wherever he went by religious circles.
A guy named Lois Song correct? The wassall Wassall.
Only Wassall. So let's dive into this guy.
Although almost everyone of Napoleon's marshals and generals

(01:04):
committed some sort of looting, violence or excess, most of them
were done in the framework of making war pay for itself, which
Napoleon also believed in. But very few of them were mean
spirited. And LOI Song has been depicted
as one of the few mean spirited generals in Napoleon's army,
especially during his time in Spain in Portugal.

(01:24):
Is this accurate? Yeah, sad.
Sadly, it is. I mean, there's no way to
whitewash that. You know our our good friends
the British often will make claims that the French are
rapacious and horrible conquerors and devoid of values
and in. This case, yeah, yeah.

(01:46):
If the shoe fits. Right.
But yeah, we're just going to talk about this guy who was born
in May 1771 in Demvier, France. What do we know of his
upbringing? So he actually had a pretty good
upbringing. Demvier is in the northeast part
of France, near the Luxembourg border.
His father was a noted jurist who was a lawyer.

(02:06):
So he grew up in a comfortable background and in fact had
access to a good education. He did not take advantage of it.
His father was part of the Constituent Assembly when the
French Revolution broke out, butprobably one of the more
conservative members from the Third Estate.

(02:28):
That is to say, he's still, you know, revolutionary in his
mindset, and things have to change.
But he was rooted more in tradition than not, and Lois all
sort of chafed under that. He goes into military service,
originally trying to enroll in ain a colonial outfit that
doesn't last long, and then whenthe revolution begins joins the

(02:49):
the French army, both times being actively discouraged.
Discouraged by his family, but he did it anyway.
Yeah, it seems like he joins in 1787 but leaves shortly
thereafter, but returns in 1788 and when the outbreak of the
French Revolution in 1780. 9 He's made of junior officers.
Yeah, seems like his career starts to begin at this point.

(03:10):
So, you know, early what's what's pretty much common with
those early volunteers in teen 91 to teen 92.
First of all, he can read and write.
So that's a great springboard toto promotion.
Also, his father is in the constituent assembly, so he has
a little bit of, of, of connection there.

(03:30):
And so that that sort of gravitas, I mean such as it is,
he gets to jump the line and become a second Lieutenant.
A short thereafter he kind of distinguished himself and two
things that he's going to be known for.
One, he leads a cavalry charge basically by himself at the
battle of Watinis against the Austrians.
But he also develops his other reputation, which isn't the not

(03:53):
the not so good one. He begins to develop a
reputation as a plunderer who was notorious for sacking
captured towns and fortifications like the Orval
Abbey. Yeah, what happens here?
So at Wet and Yee, he's on the extreme right flank of the of
the French army. The Austrians attacked most of
his compatriots, volunteers, especially in 1793, as we know,

(04:15):
often break and run. In fact, most of the units
around him not only broke, but threw down their muskets so they
could run faster. He kept his head and at the head
of a cavalry detachment charged the Austrians and forced all
them long enough to sort of retrieve the position.
So there would not be a French soldier, French officer who
would ever question La Salle's bravery.

(04:39):
He's often at the front. He's often leading by example,
wounded, not like who to know noone is, but he is wounded on on
multiple occasions. He has that bravery and he he's
a good officer in that sense, but he also has that that dark
side. Yeah, it said.
He burnt this Abbey down becauseit was providing hospitality to

(05:01):
Austrian troops. Yeah, that's one explanation.
Another one was that it was thought that maybe that Abbey
would have been the final destination for the French
monarchy as they're making the flight to Verin.
So there was some speculation that maybe there was some
collusion going on there. And, you know, he grew up in the
area and the reputed wealth of the Abbey was, you know, great.

(05:27):
So for nearly a week of his soldiers, he occupied that area.
And they systematically looted everything, Everything, John,
not just money, not silver plate.
They're taking. We have contemporary accounts.
They're taking mattresses. They're taking bed frames,
chairs, tables. I mean, literally, if it's not
nailed down, it's going. Right.

(05:47):
And and again, let's frame it with this is the French
Revolution where there's a lot of anti clerical thought and,
you know, aggression. So maybe within that, but still
that that seems extreme to sell the mattresses.
OK, so I went there and and I thought, all right, well,
obviously he's a child of the revolution.
This is some some, you know, revenge against the church.
But the eventual Archbishop of Liege, who happens to be the

(06:09):
nephew of war minister Clark wrote that assault is not anti
clerical and not antisocial. He's just for himself.
So he isn't doing this out of any.
He's not songs used, the revolutionary songs used, who's
going after the church on purpose?
It's just it's a fabulous sourceof wealth and he's going to

(06:29):
plunder everything out of it. So the Austrians advanced again.
He was forced to retreat, and then the Austrians retired.
And at that point, that's when he torched the Abbey and torched
it to cinders. At that point, it passed into
private ownership, and it did not return to the Catholic
Church until 1926. That's a long time from 1793,
whatever it is, but. Absolutely.

(06:51):
Yeah, that's a precursor for hiscareer.
So they they found probably 400,000 leaves of of UN, I mean
property coin just unaccounted for.
Yeah, well in 1795 he is promoted to General a brigade
and is around this time he firstmeets the legendary General

(07:14):
Bonaparte, soon to be Napoleon. How does Lois on serve him
during 13 Van der Meyer Meyer. So actually another sort of
political fortune. There was a couple of unrest in
1795. There was first an attempt by
Song Kulat to take over the government and then the Van der
Meer, which is the royalist plot.

(07:35):
Well, one of the deputies is in the streets and looks like he's
about to be lynched by the Song Kulat in the mob and lost on a
detachment of soldiers arrives and saves him.
And so, so at that point he's posted with the army, the
interior, which as we know Barrah had given Napoleon
responsibility for. So that's how he falls under
Napoleon's command. And he's active in von der Meer,

(07:58):
probably the more active afterwards as he is the leader
of the court martials that follow.
So he's put in charge of of summarily trying and then of
course, executing the the ringleaders.
Probably a good job for him, butit always pays to be in
Napoleon's eyes with him in his early, early days, yeah.

(08:19):
And it and it worked out in thiscase, although I don't know if
there was something in his character, but Napoleon did not
take him with him to Italy. He gets sent as a military
commander of the 25th district back up to Liege and around that
area. He's not used in the field again
until the 1799 campaign. Yeah, yeah.

(08:39):
He's not taking Egypt either. That's right.
No. So after a few years of
unemployment, he takes part in another action, this time under
the future of Marshall Senate in1799 in Switzerland.
Was he promoted again that year?Yeah.
And just to go back and I'll puta little finer refinement.
He's not unemployed. He's he's employed in the 25th

(09:00):
Military District, but he doesn't have an active field
command. I understand that there could be
something there, but he was employed.
He is still in the Army and working and that sort of thing.
Not on a frontline position, yeah.
Not on the frontline position, no, but he is called up to the
the army of of Reserve 9 serves under Messena and Suchet very
active fighting Souvaroff multiple battles, some of which

(09:22):
he won, some of which he didn't,but very, very active during
that campaign. But also active in again, forced
loans from communities and townsthat they've liberated from the
Austrians or the Russians. It's a constant theme with him.
Yeah, you mentioned before he came on that by 1795 he's
already a rich guy. Absolutely.

(09:42):
Yeah. Yeah.
And then also parlaying that richness into he's an active in
real estate. He's he buys a lot of real
estate. Formally, church lands it.
Nobody wanted, Yeah. He does actually have it seems
to at least initially have a pencil for buying the church
lands because many French at that time didn't partake in

(10:05):
purchasing French or church landeither because they didn't have
cash or because, you know, it just, I mean bad juju if I could
use that. I mean, a lot of French were
devout Catholics and and didn't want to invite that kind of.
Bad karma, bad juju. Potential bed Juju was not at

(10:26):
all troubled. He didn't care.
About that, no. Well, in 1800, Lois Hall is
wounded during Napoleon's crossing of the Alps in his
campaign against the Austrians. Do we know how he was wounded?
Yeah, so he they're coming out. The French are coming out of
they cross the passes. In northern Italy, there was a
town of Bard dominated by a fortress, more of a medieval

(10:48):
fortress, but the way that the the sides of the cliffs worked,
there was a river that came out of it and then Fort Bard
dominated this. And so the French had to figure
out a way to get out of it and lots of awesome things.
This is where my mom put the thetubes into, you know, sledges
and and pull it around. They found some goat path to try
and get around it but while somewas leading the the actual

(11:09):
assault on Bard and got gun. Well, in 1804 he receives a
Legion of Honor and is commanding troops in Marshall,
Naze's famous 6 Corps. And he's instrumental in Naze's
victory at Elkingen, correct? Yes, you know, Nay was hotly
engaged there as Mack is is trying his feeble attempt to
break out and Los all shows a great deal of initiative here

(11:32):
and they had the the basic battle plan, but Los all
initiates moving up supporting the other division, whose name I
have forgotten. But anyway, he advances at the
right and secures the battle. And and as you know, being the
big Nay fan that you are, this was one of Nay's signature
victories that the French lost fewer than 1000 people and the

(11:53):
Austrians lost close to 4000 andthen more captured on top of
that it it ended Mack's campaign.
Yeah, and and this is the point where Loisan begins a long
career serving under Nay. And people are like, well, why
would Nay employ this guy? Well, like you said earlier, he
was brave and effective. Yeah, he was brave and
effective, although that same campaign is the reason they have
a falling out because, as you know, Nay is not involved in

(12:15):
Austerlitz because he's sent to guard the passes basically
between Italy and southern Germany.
So Nay is just gone primarily inInnsbruck and around that area.
But again, Wasall is extorting you know, financial
contributions from these town towns and at one point Nay
forced him to return nearly 300,000 leave worth of worth of

(12:39):
specie and the two never had a good relationship after that
again. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.
It's funny. Napoleon did a similar thing to
Messena, and when they make themreturn the money, they get very
upset or they confiscate. Yeah.
They do. They do.
Yep. Well, in eighteen O 6, as bad
luck continues, Lloyd's Hall is involved in a hunting accident

(13:00):
which resulted and his left's arm being amputated.
Do we know what happened here? Yeah.
And again, our source for this is that Archbishop of Liege, who
who happened to be Clark's minister, Clark's nephew, and he
wrote that the accident happenedon the 19th of March and
apparently they were setting up the hunt and the animals got

(13:21):
released. And I thinking it was rabbits,
but I'm not sure. And a rabbit bolted to the left
and somehow there was a musket that was propped up, loaded
against the thing and then movedor fell.
And it caught Lausanne. It, it fired it, it was loaded
and and cocked and ready to go. And it fired and caught Lausanne
between the elbow and left elbowand left shoulder and, you know,

(13:44):
tore basically most of the fleshaway and shattered the bone.
And so the only suitable treatment was amputation.
Amputation so. They, they did successfully
amputate and then he's later in 1806 involved in campaigns.
You know, he's active in Hess and in Hanover.
So he's fighting less than six months later.

(14:05):
So it it was a good clean amputation.
Yeah, and he recovers quickly, clearly.
Well, in 1807, he takes command of the second vision.
Unreal. Your favorite guy, General, as
you know, for the invasion of Portugal.
How does this invasion go? You know, the invasion went fine
and Loisal was a last minute replacement.
Actually the the the original commander got sick and so Loisal

(14:27):
as a last minute replacement andthe invasion itself goes fine as
we as we've talked about. It does the job.
It's. Really the it's really the
occupation and then the the Portuguese insurgency that where
Lausanne acquires his really sinister reputation.
Yeah, let's discuss this. He gets the famous nickname of

(14:48):
Mineta, or one hand, and it seems he and his troops leave a
swath of destruction in Portugalwherever they go, correct?
Yeah, so the complication happens that the French army
occupied Portugal the last day of November in eighteen O 7.
We know from the 2nd of May in eighteen O 8, the revolt breaks
out in Spain. It takes a little while longer

(15:10):
for it to break out in Portugal because the Portuguese don't
have the resources and there's aFrench army occupying their
country. So as the Portuguese insurgency
begins to grow, Juno sends LaSalle up to Almeida from
Lisbon. So Almeida is the Portuguese
fortress that guards the way into Portugal from the
northeast. Yeah, it's opposite.

(15:31):
Spanish. One is Ciudad Rodrigo.
So Napoleon sends an order to Juno to move some troops up
there to establish communications with Marshall
Bezier, who's now operating in that part of of Spain.
And so Juno sends LaSalle up there.
Well, basically has to cut his way to Almeida, and there are
reprisals along the way that theFrench make for, you know,

(15:52):
civilians fighting against the French.
But it doesn't get hot and heavyuntil Lausanne is then called to
go over to a Porto, which is Portugal's second city.
Spoiler alert, he doesn't make it to a Porto.
He starts moving down the Duaro,that the insurgency is so thick
and so omnipresent that Lausannejudges rightly that it's suicide

(16:15):
to keep trying to go over to Porto.
So he goes back to Almeida. But as he goes, the contemporary
sources say you can chart Wassall's retreat by watching
the plumes of smoke from all thevillages he's set to to fire.
There's one anecdote where he puts to the sword the entire

(16:38):
population of of a village, everyone, men, women, children,
old, young, the entire village. So I mean, that's just on a
scale of viciousness that that is a little hard to fathom and
is a little out of comparison with with, you know, with
others. Right.
And he's not even done with the worst of it.

(17:00):
So he gets back to Almeida. Juno orders him back to Lisbon,
but he wants a Garrison both place at Almeida.
So Wassall dumps basically the people that can't March.
All right, you can die here in Almeida.
We're going back to Lisbon. And then they have to cut their
whole way through Lisbon. And then when they get to
Lisbon, the entire southern portion of Portugal has

(17:22):
revolted. And Juno sense Lausanne with
8000 men a flying column as theywould call to come to call them
to suppress southern Portugal. And it's really at Avora,
Portuguese city, that the worst of Lausanne's reprisals are.
Yeah. Evora, the French allegedly ask

(17:45):
her the entire town's population, you know, and Lois
on in the French army defeated by the future Duke of
Wellington. They are sent back to France as
part of the Convention of Sintra.
How quickly are these French troops back in the peninsula
after the British? Well, they landed.
I mean, they're off. The orders are waiting for them
when they land. So they get back in September,
October, November of 1808 and really in 1809, you know,

(18:08):
they're, they're, they're comingback in.
So they're not in in sort of battlefield position until early
summer of 18 O 9. But I mean, that's pretty quick
turn around. It is it.
Is I don't want to Passover Avora without saying something
about it because the, the, the, the excesses here were just
egregious. So at this point, the Spanish
and the Portuguese are helping kind of trying to coordinate

(18:31):
together a resistance deploy in front of Avora outnumbered
against seasoned French troops and their massacred right.
And then for more than 24 hours,La Somme tells the troops do
whatever you want to, I don't care.
So they sack of aura and and by French estimates that casualties

(18:53):
are three or 4000 Portuguese, it's probably more than that and
also 4000 captured as prisoners.And you know, we have
contemporary accounts of French soldiers bayonetting old men,
women, sometimes children. It really, really was an
egregious thing. Well, yeah, and that's he earns

(19:13):
the reputation. Mineta like they the Portuguese
want to find and kill this man. Now they at the next battle,
Porto, they do capture a French general general flaw.
Yes. What happens here?
So ironically, Flaw was also in Juno's first army and so he was
doing some reconnaissance of a portrait.
This is Seoul's second invasion.A noted nice guy, Portugal, a

(19:37):
nice man. Very Yeah, Flaw's a quality
human being and a Cape. A very good and capable officer
who has an A fantastic career after this.
But he's reconnoitering Aporto and got a little too close and
the Portuguese captured him. They stripped him naked and they
drag him into the the the streets of Aporto and they start

(20:01):
chanting and kill him, kill him,kill Mineta.
You know Fois has enough. Sang flaw to realize at that
point that they think he's Los sals, so he holds out both of
his hands like hey and his life is spared.
He would have been lynched otherwise.
But he was even aware of Los alls reputation.

(20:22):
No one was not aware of Los Allsreputation.
Yeah, well in 1810 for the thirdinvasion of Portugal, Luisan
again is a divisional commander for Marshall Nays 6 core, which
you knows help, he captures the town of Astorga.
He also helps Nay captured Ciudad Rodrigo in 1810, but Nay
is eventually sent back to France for insubordination by

(20:44):
Marshall Messena. Loisan takes over 6 core, but he
has no Nay in my opinion and after a near run loss at Fuentes
de Anoro, Messena is sacked by Napoleon.
What happens to Loisano when Marshall Marmont takes over?
So what happens is Marmont completely reorganizes the army
and he does away with the core. So all the core commanders like

(21:04):
you know, and Wasall Bertrand are sent back.
They don't. They don't have a role anymore
and it's just Marmol and Six or 7 divisions.
Now I should mention just real quick in 1810 during that third
invasion, he fights bravely and well at Busaco, almost gets to
the Ridge before getting caught in a murderous crossfire and
sent down sent packing. He fights with distinction at

(21:27):
Fuentes Donero. He's he's basically the pinning
force that puts pressure on the village itself.
So again, capable military service, if you overlook the I
mean, in Spain, he's, he's ransoming nuns for heaven's
sakes. I mean, nobody takes nuns to

(21:48):
ransom them. Messena made him give the nuns
back. The nuns got back safely.
I'm happy to report the nuns gotback safely.
But I mean, this is, he has no morals.
He has no scruples. He he just he was noted by some
of his contemporaries for his lack of empathy.
We wonder why the Marshalls and Napoleon kept employing this
guy. I mean, they had good capable

(22:09):
generals like Foie and some of these other ones, you know, that
that we're we're a good man and and you wonder how he kept his
role. Well, he's personally brave and
he's he's competent. We did loss over one of the
areas where he almost got court martialed.
That second invasion of of Portugal, he abandoned the
position that was the lynchpin for the French retreat.
And then after Sewell was defeated, he was put in a really

(22:30):
hard place. There was almost court martialed
there, OK, but there wasn't any proof that he there was some
story that there was a conspiracy to abandon that
position and there was no proof.But Seoul wrote back to Napoleon
and said this guy does not belong here.
He he adds no value. Well, it's interesting because
like his career now, kind of it's reached its apex and it

(22:53):
goes downhill pretty quick. In 1812 he's in command of a
reserve division of 10,000 German and Italian boys during
the invasion of Russia, and tragedy strikes again.
What happens to this division that Lois On is commanding?
Well, all right, So the two things going on here, these are
raw conscripts. They're they're moved from
Danzig, Koenigsberg, and then they're sent into Russia.

(23:15):
But they're sent into Russia at the worst possible moment.
These folks are camping without shelter when the temperatures
hit 35° below 0 centigrade. So basically the entire
division, these are all raw recruits.
They don't know how to handle this and the whole thing just
vaporized. Yeah, I mean, I know Napoleon
needed them to kind of keep a corridor open, but yet for the

(23:38):
whole division to die basically of exposure, it's awful.
Yeah, he was court martialed forthat, and originally Napoleon
was quite displeased. Yeah, and Loisan in 1813, he's
basically sidelined to commanding fortresses.
He's also arrested by order of Napoleon for not marching his
division to the front. It just seems like his career is

(23:59):
imploding at this point. So that's the same issue.
It's just conflated in the in the sources.
But it was the IT was the issue in Russia that was the problem.
OK, Yeah, well, he's unemployed in 1815 and dies a year later in
1816. What do you think this guy's
legacy is? Well.
For the for the people that matter, he did rally to Napoleon

(24:20):
in in 1815 when the 100 days happened and he was at that
point a military examiner for several military divisions,
especially for gearing up the National Guard and getting them
ready. So he had a minor role to play.
But then November of 1815 he retires and then dies very
shortly thereafter. There's a phrase in Portuguese

(24:41):
today, pro minetta, which basically means go see the one
handed. So if you're in trouble, like if
you've done something wrong and you know you're about to face
the consequences, the Portuguesewill say pro minetta, like go
see the one armed man. And I think that's probably a
fitting legacy for this guy. Yeah, not a good one.

(25:05):
Not a good one. Yeah.
Well, I thank you for that, Charles.
It was very interesting on a guythat I didn't know much about,
quite frankly. So I'm, I'm glad you educated
all of us on that. Yeah.
And we, we just scratched the service.
We, we, we could go on. There's a ton of stuff here on
this guy that's quite, quite colorful.
Yeah, that's always the pitfall of my wonderful podcast.

(25:25):
Like, I mean, I just did one on Too Rough.
We could go 5 hours on that guy,but it's like, yeah, he's just
it. You try and get the highlights
of each each individual. But if you want to learn more
about Charles, you can find him on Blue Sky.
This key, I think it's BSKY dot bubbles vampire.
If you're not on Blue Sky, are you on Facebook?
As what? No, I'm just on Blue Sky.
That's my only social. I'm on Instagram, but I I kind

(25:48):
of forget. I don't post anything there.
I forget what my handle there is.
OK blue sky it is we we thank Charles for his time as always
and we love having on the show. Thank you, Charles I.
Appreciate it John. Invite me anytime.