BATTLE OF TURIN 1706 - FRENC REGIMENT BOURBON

 This regiment came to my attention entirely by chance. In fact, it does not appear at all in the order of battle in my possession, nor in the lists of regiments that took part in the Battle of Turin and, above all, in the siege of Turin in 1706. How, then, did I manage to identify it?

The answer lies in the fact that I am currently trying to reconstruct the uniforms of all the French regiments stationed in the salient between the Dora and the Po: precisely those units that were directly involved in the siege operations, but did not take a direct part in the Battle of Turin itself. In the list of regiments deployed on that front, I found a reference to a regiment called “Besançon”.

A search through all my sources, however, ruled out the existence of any regiment bearing that name. Further research proved equally fruitless, even in sources that preserve at least some trace of regiments raised from local militias. There was absolutely nothing.

This naturally raised the suspicion—and in cases such as this it is entirely legitimate—that the original handwritten sources had been misread and incorrectly transcribed. The non-existent “Besançon” might therefore have been another name beginning with the same letter, ending in a similar way, and with an illegible central portion.

Almost by chance, I began by checking the Bourbon Regiment and immediately found, in every source, that it had taken part in the siege of Turin. The mystery was therefore solved. The regiment in question was not the non-existent Besançon Regiment—which, incidentally, would have been the only regiment named after a city rather than a province or region—but the Bourbon Regiment.

My source specifies that the regiment took part in the battle with only one battalion. It is likely that the other battalion remained stationed at Nice, which had been occupied the previous year. Indeed, the regiment’s two battalions were often deployed separately.