Background
Madeleine Petit-Jean was born in 1746 in Metz, Lorraine, France. Her early life is unknown.
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Madeleine Petit-Jean
Edit Profilemilitary Revolutionary cannoneer
Career
Madeleine Petit-Jean joined the military at the age of forty-six. For nearly a year during the period after her third husband's death Petit-Jean served in the military, where she found steady employment and a subsistence wage. During service in the Vendee in western France, she was captured by the enemy and tortured. Later released, she served until September 1793, when she was seriously injured (a knife wound in the right thigh and a musket shot to the right foot), leaving her partially incapacitated.
Petit-Jean was expelled from the military after the 1793 enactment of a law restricting women from serving in the French military. Petit-Jean petitioned for assistance on the basis of her disability. When her final petition reached the National Convention in 1794, the deputies noted that Madeleine's first two husbands had died in naval service, and her third at the Bastille, yet she had not strayed from service to her nation. She was, according to their recognition, "a true republican... who has neither a place to live nor any means of subsistence." She was accorded thirty sous per day, which at the time was a bare minimum. Later in 1794, based on the record of her third husband and in recognition of her own military service and injuries, Petit-Jean was granted 636 livres per year as a pension.
Achievements
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Madeleine Petit-Jean is known for leaving her family and dressing as a man, enrolling in a compony of gunners that formed part of a battalion leaving to put down a counter-revolutionary insurgency in the Vendée in 1793. She was later captured by royalists who released her, unaware that she was a woman.
Connections
Madeleine Petit-Jean lost fifteen of seventeen children and having been widowed three times.
