Vive la France!

And the next full 100! I'm really going 'wow' about the amount of unique visitors I have on my blog.
So France is next. Welcome and thanks for coming here - I hope you like what you see.

Again, I have had a longer thought about what to paint for the French visitors. You know, the lists of plastic figure producers are full of French units for each and every period of the Napoleonic era. I thought about French marshals, even Napoleon himself - and then threw away the thought. Too obvious, isn't it?
We have seen flag-waving blue line regiments over and over again. And I really don't intend to come around the corner with the Old Guard again.

Well - I decided to go for something small and different. Something rarely seen. And here they are, fellow Frenchmen from the mountains:

French chasseurs des montagnes! Men in brown and blue - a group of fusiliers, to be exact. I first found them in a book from Hourtoulle, Girbal and Courcelle. The chasseurs des montagnes are an interesting 'unit' - you find many different outfits on the web and in different sourcebooks. In fact, they were raised in different departments and from the start, their equipment was not as homogeneous as for example within the standard line regiments. So their appearance was sometimes a bit mixed, which was the reason why I've decided to honour that by painting every soldier a little bit different. These soldiers were only engaged in the Peninsula campaign and mainly served in what is called 'the small war' - a role in which they were really successful.

Here are some more pictures:

I tried to give the uniforms, especially the trousers, a dusty and shabby look. Again, the pictures don't show that really good...

The officer is a conversion - especially for Jen and Ben! I just cut off them walking legs (the original officer figure looks like this: http://i1106.photobucket.com/albums/h361/Zedalist/Cleve2.jpg) and put the body onto some legs I took from a fusilier. The operation wasn't easy because of the jacket laps and the scabbard, but the result looks nice.

I hope you like the result. In fact I really do.

Again, a positive side effect is having something more for my long-term pre-1812 uniform project.
The next things which I have already on my desk will be mini-groups of the Valais regiment and the regiment of the grand duchy of Frankfurt.