Rye Writes 
Historian Extraordinaire Guy Dempsey

– By Peter Jovanovich –

One of the delights of living in Rye is discovering the hidden talents of the men and women who live among us. Often it seems, one knows someone from the Y or a club, or from church or synagogue, while little knowing how creative and talented he or she is.

One such person is Guy Dempsey, lawyer by day, and renowned historian of the Napoleonic wars the rest of the time. He has written and published five books on the subject, numerous journal articles, and is a regular columnist for the French journal, “Soldats Napoléoniens.” Recently, The Rye Record had the opportunity to sit down with him and learn more about his passion for military history.

“My interest began as a boy. I collected military miniatures: those precisely and, presumably, accurately painted lead soldiers, particularly those of the Napoleonic wars. Early on, I came to realize that the value of the miniatures — they're not meant to be played with after all, these aren't toy soldiers — is in their accuracy. That's what I believe in as an historian: the supreme value is to be truthful and accurate.”

Dempsey was a history major in college, where he received his university's prize for the best senior thesis in history, naturally, on Napoleonic history. And for the next decade or two, whenever he had an opportunity while visiting Europe, or in his spare time, he researched all sorts of questions regarding the era. Fluent in French, German and Spanish, Dempsey delved through myriad archives to find the facts.

“Historical research is a bit like being the detective of cold cases,” says Dempsey. Indeed, it was a truly cold case that led to Dempsey's first book, published in 1994. As Dempsey recounts, he was browsing through the stacks at Brown University, which holds the world's largest collection of Napoleonic iconography, when he came upon some paintings of French soldiers from the 1807 campaign against Prussia. “I was startled to realize that these watercolor paintings, which historians had for decades presumed lost or destroyed, were in fact still in existence — misfiled in a huge archive of materials.” Dempsey’s book, ”Napoleon’s Soldiers,” published in 1994, was immediately recognized as one of the best books published on military uniforms of the Napoleonic era.

“Of course,” Dempsey reminds readers, “these uniforms looked a lot better in pictures than they did in reality. The Napoleonic soldier was issued one uniform every three years. He slept in it, fought in it and was buried in it. If you had been in the presence of a soldier of that time, you first sensation would have been of the overwhelming stench coming from his worn, tattered and faded uniform.”

Dempsey holds great admiration for the bravery of the soldiers of that era. Because of his insistence on finding primary sources — letters, journals, drawings, etc. — to support his conclusions, he has an almost encyclopedic understanding of war, of men in conflict, and how and why they did what they did.

For example, he recounts a story from his forthcoming book, “Albuera 1811: The Bloodiest Battle of the Peninsular War,” of how a British officer defended his regiment's colors during a devastating cavalry charge by Polish lancers fighting in the French army. Dempsey relates: “Here's a man who has one arm cut off, then his nose, and still with the remaining arm grabs the regimental colors and stuffs them into his jacket to prevent their falling to the enemy.” He continues, “Such battles bring out the extremes of behavior, from incomprehensible valor to rank cowardice, from intense determination to vacillating indecision, and blind stupidity to inspired brilliance.”

Pretty exciting stuff! “Albuera: 1811: The Bloodiest Battle of the Peninsular War” will be published this fall.