Was Napoleon Really Attacked by an Army of Rabbits?
It's a story that resurfaces every year or two: Napoleon Bonaparte, conqueror of Europe, driven off a field by rabbits. Most retellings dress it up with a precise-sounding number — hundreds, a thousand, three thousand — as if the headcount were the settled part and the incident itself were the question. Going back to the one witness anyone actually cites for this shows it's the other way around.
The claim
In the summer of 1807, near Paris, a rabbit-shooting outing organized for Napoleon by his chief of staff Alexandre Berthier went wrong: the released rabbits, instead of fleeing the hunting party, grouped together and repeatedly swarmed Napoleon, forcing him to retreat to his carriage.
Source trail
Every retelling we found, followed back, leads to one place: the memoirs of General Paul Thiébault, a French officer who was evidently told of or witnessed the outing. Thiébault died in 1846. His memoirs were not published until 1895 in French, with an English translation the following year — 49 years after his death and roughly 88 years after the rabbit hunt itself. No account from 1807, or from anyone other than Thiébault, turned up in this session. From that single, decades-late source, the story has been retold across history-trivia sites and blogs for well over a decade, and the number of rabbits attached to it has drifted with each retelling.
What's confirmed
- The story's only named source, read directly, does give a specific rabbit count — and it's "a thousand," not the "3,000" several current retellings use. Fetched directly from the Internet Archive's digitized copy of The Memoirs of Baron Thiébault, vol. 2 (translated by Arthur John Butler, London, 1896), the chapter titled "Napoleon's Rabbit-Shooting" (archive.org, pages 195–196, checked 2026-08-25) states: "the marshal... considered that he was as right as he could be when he had ordered a thousand of those animals to be turned down in the park on the morning of the day. An order of that kind is not executed by halves, and not a rabbit of the thousand was wanting." No other figure appears anywhere in the passage.
- The same source explains why it happened, and it's a mundane supply mix-up, not a trained-animal legend. The same fetched passage states plainly: "Berthier's emissary, not aware that there could be any difference between one rabbit and another, had bought rabbits from the hutch instead of from the warren. The consequence was that the poor rabbits had taken the sportsmen, including the Emperor, for the purveyors of their daily cabbage, and had flung themselves on them with all the more eagerness that they had not been fed that day." Farmed rabbits, used to being fed by hand, mobbed the first humans they saw that day.
- The basic sequence — Napoleon driven back, twice — is described in specific, checkable detail in the source itself, not just summarized secondhand. The same passage describes an initial retreat by the rabbits after Berthier sent coachmen after them with whips, followed by the rabbits regrouping and outflanking the party: "the intrepid rabbits turned the Emperor's flank, attacked him frantically in the rear, refused to quit their hold, piled themselves up between his legs till they made him stagger, and forced the conqueror of conquerors, fairly exhausted, to retreat and leave them in possession of the field, only thankful that some of them had not succeeded in scaling the rumble of the Emperor's carriage."
- Thiébault's dates, and the decades-long gap between the event and its publication, are straightforward biographical facts, not part of the disputed story. Wikipedia's own article on Paul Thiébault (en.wikipedia.org, fetched directly, checked 2026-08-25) gives his dates as 14 December 1769 – 14 October 1846, and states his memoirs were "published in 1895, with an English translation appearing the next year" — confirming the memoir reached print only after his death, decades after the event it describes.
What isn't
- The number that spreads furthest doesn't come from the source everyone cites for it. Several current retellings state "almost 3,000" or "as many as 3,000" rabbits; others hedge between "hundreds" and "a thousand." None of the retellings checked this session point to any source besides Thiébault's memoir for their higher figures, and the memoir passage we fetched directly states "a thousand" once, specifically, with no other number given. The larger figures currently in circulation don't trace to anything we could find — they read as drift, not as an alternate account.
- No exact date survives in the part of the source we could reach — only "that summer." The commonly repeated date, July 1807, is consistent with the surrounding narrative: the same memoir places Thiébault's governorship of Fulda as ending "May 17, 1807," immediately followed by mentions of the Tilsit peace negotiations, which concluded in July 1807. But the rabbit-hunt passage itself, as fetched, does not state a specific date — "July" is an inference from context, not something the text says outright.
- The story rests on one witness, writing decades after the fact, with no corroboration found. No second 1807-era account of this event turned up in this session, from Berthier's side, Napoleon's side, or any bystander. That doesn't make the story false — but a single late memoir is a thinner foundation than the confident, oft- illustrated retellings suggest.
- A detail some retellings add — that Thiébault held a personal grudge against Berthier, implicitly a reason to doubt his account — does not trace to anything we could check. The passage we fetched directly does reference an old insult, but it's one Napoleon himself is quoted as having made about Berthier's courage years earlier ("Berthier is not of the stuff of which they say brave men are made"), not a grudge held by Thiébault, the narrator. Nothing in the text we could access supports the "grudge" framing some sites use to caveat the story. We are not asserting it's true or false, only that it isn't confirmed by what we read.
Verdict
This one holds up better than most animal trivia that goes viral: it isn't invented out of nothing, it traces to a real, named eyewitness general, and reading the actual memoir page ourselves — rather than the tenth blog paraphrasing it — confirms the core sequence of events in specific, consistent detail. What doesn't hold up is the number doing the clicking today. Thiébault wrote "a thousand." The figure that keeps spreading, "almost 3,000," isn't in the book anyone cites for the story — it's an embellishment with no traceable source of its own, riding on the credibility of a source that says something else.