Louis Mandrin was a French brigand (highwayman) from Dauphiné

Dauphiné

The Dauphiné or Dauphiné Viennois is a former province in southeastern France, whose area roughly corresponded to that of the present departments of :Isère, :Drôme, and :Hautes-Alpes....

.

Biography

Born at Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs

Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs

Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs is a commune in the Isère department in south-eastern France.-References:*...

, he became head of the family at 17, on his father's death. The family was well established in the region, although not doing as well as it had been.

His first incident with the 'la ferme générale' (the later day Inland Revenue and tax collectors) was in 1748, under contract to supply to the French army in Italy with « 100 mules less 3 ». He lost most of the animals on the way back to Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs

Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs

Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs is a commune in the Isère department in south-eastern France.-References:*...

, during the crossing of the Alps

Alps

The Alps is one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany to France in the west....

. He only had 17 beasts left on arrival, and they were in an extremely sorry state. The Ferme générale refused to pay him.

On July 27, 1753 following a brawl his opponent was killed. Louis Mandrin and his friend Benoît Brissaud were sentenced to death. Mandrin fled but Brissaud was caught and hanged in Breuil square in Grenoble. On the same day, his brother Pierre (Mandrin) was hanged for counterfeiting so he declared a personal war against the tax collectors [la Ferme générale].

The tax collectors [la Ferme générale] were hated by the population. They collected all taxes for the King, unspecified sums, levied on salt [gabelle] tobacco and farming. The system was widely abused as they paid the royal coffers only a pre agreed amount; and became powerful and wealthy as a result.

Mandrin joined a gang of smugglers operating in the Swiss Cantons, France and Savoy, which was then a sovereign state. Mainly trafficking tobacco. He soon became head of this gang - a small army of some 300 men which he led and organised like a military regiment. They had warehouses for weapons and stolen goods in Savoy (then a duchy that was part of the kingdom of Sardinia) and believed himself out of the reach from the French authorities. During 1754 he organised six military style campaigns. Targeting only the most unpopular tax collectors which gained him huge support from the local population.

He bought goods (cloth, hides, tobacco, canvas and spices) in Switzerland, which he then resold in French towns without paying the Ferme Générale any of the tax due. The population was delighted with such bargains. Rapidly, laws were passed, forbidding the buying of his smuggled goods; but in [Rodez], he made a show of provocation by forcing Ferme Générale employees to buy his goods at gunpoint.

The Ferme générale, exasperated by this « bandit » whose popularity was ever growing, obtained help from the Royal Army in trying to stop him. He still managed to take refuge in Savoy, near Pont-de-Beauvoisin. The farmer generals then decided to enter the Duchy illegally by disguising 500 men as peasants. They seized Mandrin at the fortified farm in Rochefort-en-Novalaise

Rochefort, Savoie

Rochefort is a commune in the Savoie department in the Rhône-Alpes region in south-eastern France....

 betrayed by of two of his men. When King Charles Emmanuel III of Sardinia

Charles Emmanuel III of Sardinia

Charles Emmanuel III was the Duke of Savoy and King of Sardinia from 1730 until his death.-Biography:...

 learned of the intrusion on his territory, he demanded from Louis XV

Louis XV of France

Louis XV was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and of Navarre from 1 September 1715 until his death. He succeeded his great-grandfather at the age of five, his first cousin Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, served as Regent of the kingdom until Louis's majority in 1723...

 that the prisoner be turned over to him, to which the French King agreed. However, the farmers general, anxious to be rid of Mandrin for good, hurried his trial and execution. He was tried on May 24, 1755, then broken on the wheel

Breaking wheel

The breaking wheel, also known as the Catherine wheel or simply the wheel, was a torture device used for capital punishment in the Middle Ages and early modern times for public execution by bludgeoning to death...

 in Valence, Drôme

Valence, Drôme

Valence is a commune in southeastern France, the capital of the Drôme department, situated on the left bank of the Rhône, south of Lyon on the railway to Marseilles.Its inhabitants are called Valentinois...

 on May 26, in front of onlookers, and endured the torture without a cry. After 8 minutes, he was strangled to put an end to his suffering.

The man was dead but the wrong righting bandit's legend was just beginning. His struggle against the injustice of the Ancien Régime was sung throughout France by a ballad that is still known today, the Complainte de Mandrin whose author remain unknown.

Extremely popular during his life, Mandrin remains famous to this day, in his native Dauphiné, in the Savoie and to a lesser degree, in the rest of France.

La complainte de Mandrin (Mandrin's Lament)

This ballad, dated 1755, is excerpted from an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era. He replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer for the harpsichord of his time, alongside François...

, composed in 1733 : Hippolyte et Aricie

Hippolyte et Aricie

Hippolyte et Aricie was the first opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau, which opened to great controversy at the Académie Royale de Musique, Paris on October 1, 1733. The libretto, by Abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, is based on Racine's tragedy Phèdre. The opera takes the traditional form of a tragédie en...

. It was then covered anonymously under the title by which it is still known. The text was also published as an appendix to a book titled Précis de la vie de Louis Mandrin ("Treatise on the Life of Louis Mandrin").

Cinema and TV

• Mandrin, 1st period : The Liberator (1948)
• Mandrin, 2nd period : Tragedy of a century (1948)
• Mandrin, gentleman robber (1962, from a book by Arthur Bernède
  Arthur Bernède
  Arthur Bernède was a French writer, poet, opera libretist, and playwright.He was born in Redon, Ille-et-Vilaine department, in Brittany....
  
  )
• Mandrin, bandit of honour (1971, TV series in 6 episodes)
• Les Chants de Mandrin (2011)

Bières Mandrin

Since 2002, the brigand lends his name to a walnut flavored beer brewed in Grenoble. Today, the Brasserie artisanale du Dauphiné makes 6 different beers under that brand.

External links

• http://www.mandrin.org (in French)