Bands of Aveyron during the Ffrench Revolution, Consulate, and First Empire

The southern provinces of France, where the local population spoke Occitan, had their own long traditions of disobedience to the central government. The revolution of the 18th century added only new colors to the anti-government demonstrations: now the robbery was committed under religious or political slogans. Napoleon's administrators inherited a difficult legacy, as there were several “problematic” social groups in the South: the old “communal elites”, recalcitrant priests, evaders and deserters, emigrants and royalists, hereditary smugglers and robbers — and each of them challenged the government in its own way. The Aveyron department, one of the most mountainous and wooded in the South, became for a long time the arena of a “little war” between the authorities and “brigands”, as the government called both ideological insurgents and common criminals. Armed bandits, playing pétanque in full view of passers-by, were perceived there as an ordinary detail of the landscape. The authorities were especially annoyed by the robberies of government couriers: the transportation of tax revenues was poorly guarded, and it was possible to quickly get rich, for the glee of taxpayers. No matter that the people's memory romanticized the bandits, they remained criminals. So, par example, the famous “thief from the Alpuches” robbed and killed under the Ancient Regime, and under revolutionary governments, and under Napoleon, without caring about the political preferences of his victims. Deserters and draft dodgers became a large driving force of anti-government actions. The level of robbery sometimes rose, sometimes fell, but even Napoleon was unable to eradicate it completely: cheerful reports on the fulfillment of the plan for conscripts only veiled the local rejection of the political line of the regime.